The Sacrificed Body : Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom [1 ed.] 9780822979135, 9780822962618

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SLAVIC STUDIES/CULTURAL THEORY

—Gregory Jusdanis, The Ohio State University “Historians do not generally doubt that intercommunal violence can plague any society on earth, but they are generally in agreement that different regions or sets of cultures express the causes and dynamics of that violence in unique ways. Tatjana Aleksić, in this solidly researched study, focuses on culture, specifically literature, as a way of describing intercommunal violence in the Balkans. What we see in examples from Serbia, Albania, Greece, Croatia, and Romania is that nationalist violence, or ‘ethnic conflict,’ in Southeastern Europe, is a kind of subordination of individuality to the perceived demands of centralized rule or state building.” —John K. Cox, North Dakota State University Living in one of the world’s most volatile regions, the people of the Balkans have witnessed almost unrelenting political, economic, and social upheaval. In response, many have looked to building communities, both psychologically and materially, as a means of survival in the wake of crumbling governments and states. The foundational structures of these communities often center on the concept of individual sacrifice for the good of the whole. The Sacrificed Body examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkans. Tatjana Aleksić further relates this theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. In numerous examples, ranging from literature to film and performance art, Aleksić views the theme of sacrifice and its relation to exclusion based on gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, or politics for the sake of community building. She finds that the sacrifice narrative becomes most prevalent during times of crisis brought on by wars, weak governments, foreign threats, or even globalizing tendencies. By employing cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies, Aleksić exposes a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

THE SACRIFICED BODY

“A multifaceted analysis of sacrifice and violence, Aleksić’s book will have a major impact on Balkan studies because it takes issue with feminism’s idealization of the female body; it conducts an analysis of cultural material from diverse nations; it shows the survival of key literary and cultural tropes; it demonstrates the interrelation between culture and politics, nation and state, literature and identity; and because it examines the victim without falling into the trap of victimology.”

ALEKSIC´

THE SACRIFICED BODY

BALKAN COMMUNITY BUILDING AND THE FEAR OF FREEDOM

Tatjana Aleksić is associate professor of South Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS www.upress.pitt.edu Cover image: I [ ] CU, Cooper Union, New York, April 2011. Courtesy of Nataša Bojić Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

Aleksic_mech.indd 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6261-8 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6261-6

PITTSBURGH

TATJANA ALEKSIC´ 9/9/13 12:51 PM

The Sacrificed Body

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies Jonathan Harris, Editor

the Sacrificed Body Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom

Tatjana Aleksic´

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2013, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aleksić, Tatjana. The sacrificed body: Balkan community building and the fear of freedom / Tatjana Aleksić. pages cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies) ISBN 978-0-8229-6261-8 (pbk.) 1. Group identity—Balkan Peninsula. 2. Communities—Balkan Peninsula. 3. Communalism— Balkan Peninsula. I. Title. DR45.A44 2013 949.605—dc23

2013023782

For Dubravka

I am inside a wall like Manole’s wife Ana Only that I am not Ana, and the one who walled me in Has never had a dream in his life. He enclosed me in a wall ready made, In his own defensive wall So that I would be neither inside his boundary Nor outside. He dreams only now at last And moves to release me from the dry stone, But he no longer knows where he walled me in. —Ileana Mâlâncioiu, Legend of the Walled-Up Wife

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Legendary Roots of Community Construction

xi 1

1. Community, Power, and the Body 21 2. A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community 46 3. The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament 79 4. The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis: The Return of the Repressive 110 5. Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History 151

Conclusion: Community, Communalism, Communism

185

Notes 199 Selected Bibliography 247 Index 263

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book benefited from the advice and friendship of many people, as well as generous support from my home institution. I am grateful to the University of Michigan for the LSA/OVPR grant that financed various stages of my research but even more so for the “nurturance leave” that allowed me the time necessary to think about nothing other than writing and completing this book. A big thank you to the Modern Greek Program of the University of Michigan for making possible an extended stay in Greece during the summer of 2010. I wish to thank many colleagues from my two departments, the Comparative Literature and Slavic departments of the University of Michigan, for their continuous support and active participation in the several stages leading to the completion of this book. Yopie Prins, Silke-Maria Weineck, and Herb Eagle have been department chairs and advisors who not only showed trust in my project but on occasion had to take charge of keeping my unruly temperament from ruining the entire effort. Special thanks to Vangelis Calotychos, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Anton Shammas, Artemis Leontis, Kader Konuk, and Neni Panourgia for their guidance and strategic support throughout this long and difficult process. The ideas and opinions in this work have been influenced and polished in discussions with many people. I am especially grateful to Stathis Gourgouris, Zoran Milutinović, and Herb Eagle for carefully reading and commenting on my manuscript during the workshop organized by the Comparative Literature and Slavic departments in January 2011. Yopie Prins, Anton Shammas, Vangelis Calotychos, Artemis Leontis, Kader Konuk, Nataša Kovačević, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Tatjana Rosić, Josephine Diamond, Gerald Pirog, and Tomislav Longinović have all contributed their thoughts on one of the versions or various sections of this book. I am grateful to Andrej Popović and Želimir Žilnik for the permission to publish photographs from the film Rani radovi [Early works]. Big thanks to Marina Abramović for letting me publish photographs from her performances. I also thank Professor Peter Bien, Elias Maglinis, Christine Neufeld, Milica Bakić-Hayden, and Robert Hayden, who each helped in the making of this book. I am grateful to the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for the University of Pittsburgh Press for their valuable opinions and comments and to Danica Newell, xi

Sydney Russell, Amberle Sherman, and Breanna Ham for technical support. Finally, I owe a big thanks to the University of Pittsburgh Press director Peter Kracht for his belief in this book and to Carol Sickman-Garner and Alex Wolfe for patiently editing my sometimes wild English. Any errors or inconsistencies that persist in the argument are mine alone. This is the place to thank Aleksandar, Vlad, Maria, Corina, Basak, Richard, Will, Melissa, Frank, Jasmine, Harun, and Ervis, whose discussions in my graduate seminar on nationalism have helped me better formulate my ideas. I cannot even begin to name all the friends whose unselfish love and support continue to be the most valuable assets I have acquired through the years; I can only hope to be deserving of and return these with the same intensity with which they are offered. My family has given me as much as they could to help me get this far, and my gratitude and love go to them. I owe the most to my best friend, who has shown only love and understanding through the trials of the many years we spent together in Serbia, as well as in our voluntary exile. It is thanks to him that I will someday be able to think of this time as the best part of my life.



xii Acknowledgments

The Sacrificed Body

Introduction The Legendary Roots of Community Construction

Three brothers build a citadel Mrljavčevići brothers three. ... Three years on River Bojana Three hundred men build Skadar’s walls, The workmen labor three long years. In vain they try to raise the walls, In vain they try to build the fort: What workmen raise throughout the day, The vila razes in the night. ... From mountains high the vila calls: “Vukašin, listen, you must hear, your torment end, no treasure waste. You cannot lay foundations, King, Or ever raise Fort Skadar’s walls. There are three royal brothers here, And each one has a faithful wife: Tomorrow whosoever comes To bring the men their daily meal, Immure her in the tower walls: At once the groundwork will be strong, At once the citadel can grow.” —The Building of Skadar, a Serbian epic

Forty-five builders and sixty apprentices Were building the foundations to a bridge on the river at Arta. They built all day, and every night their work crumbled away. The builders and the apprentices began to weep and mourn their wasted work. “Worthless is all our work and toil, a doom is on our labor: We build all day, and every night our work crumbles away.” A little bird flew by, it settled on the farther bank, It did not sing like any bird, it sang not like a swallow, It sang and spoke with a little human voice: “Unless you make a human a ghost, your bridge will never stand: But do not destroy an orphan, a stranger or a traveler: Destroy instead the lovely wife of your own masterbuilder, Who comes each morning late and late again each evening comes.” —The Bridge of Arta, a Greek ballad

The immurement of a female body into the foundations of an edifice, usually a bridge, city walls, or a monastery, is a common trope known to exist in numerous variations in all literary traditions of the Balkan region. The Serbian epic poem The Building of Skadar and the Greek ballad The Bridge 1

of Arta share a common narrative model: Builders gather around the task of constructing an edifice of unique beauty and importance. They work hard during the day, but each night their structure is razed by a supernatural power that demands a human sacrifice to support the foundations. The bridge of Arta is the enterprise of an unknown sponsor, while the character responsible for both the construction and the sacrifice is the chief engineer, Master Builder Manole. He invests the bridge with his ambition and his skills, he negotiates the terms under which the bridge will be allowed to stand, and he suffers the loss of his wife. Betraying his wife’s loyalty and love, Manole deceives her into entering the foundations of the bridge, where she gets buried alive under concrete and stone. The city of Skadar is sponsored by three royal brothers, the Serbian medieval king Vukašin and his two siblings. When the vila requests one of their wives in exchange for the city, the two elder brothers agree to cheat the youngest one by warning their wives not to visit the construction site the next morning. The honest brother lets the oath he gave to his brothers prevail over his love and as a consequence sees his beloved wife immured alive into the foundations. Although the “lovely wife” becomes the sacrificial offering in these two and in most other variants of the Balkan sacrificial legend, the original request voiced by the supernatural power is of a different kind. Thus in The Building of Skadar the vila originally demands the sacrifice of baby twins, Stojan and Stoja—their names derived from the verb stajati, “to stand.” However, when the search for such baby twins proves futile, the spirit alters its demand. The bird in The Bridge of Arta apparently requests the wife’s sacrifice from the start, although some other versions of the ballad tell a different story. These contain bargaining scenes between the master builder and the bird-messenger, in which the builder shamelessly offers his dearest family members, including his children, to be sacrificed for the sake of his ambitious enterprise. When none gets accepted, he offers to immure his wife, to which the bird agrees. The wife is offered last, not as the most precious gift, but as the least deserving one, since the master builder states that another woman can easily substitute for his wife. Being neither a total stranger to the husband’s family nor a blood relation places the wife in a marginal position and defines her as an appropriate choice for the sacrifice. Again it is the husband who sends his unsuspecting wife to a frightening and premature end.1 Substitution of the sacrificial body plays an important role, both in the sacrificial logic of this Balkan legend and in the other narratives I discuss. Rene Girard, for example, insists that sacrifice always entails a substitution of one sacrificial offering for another but also that each act of sacrifice entails a “degree of misunderstanding.”2 In the Greek version the “misunderstanding”

2 Introduction

arises in the (deliberate) misinterpretation of the message that the master builder dispatches to his wife. The master builder instructs the bird to tell his wife not to hurry to the construction site, as he is likely hoping for some chance event that would reverse the inevitable and clear him of the responsibility for her death. The bird, however, advises the woman to make haste because her husband summons her and thus accelerates her tragic end. The Building of Skadar lacks this dimension of a deliberate misinterpretation but emphasizes disloyalty and deception among kin. The choice of the victim depends on the character of the three royal brothers themselves, as they undergo a triple test of loyalty: to their personal integrity, to their wives and sacred vows, and to the unknown authority that orders the sacrifice. Regardless of their response, the men are bound to default on at least one count. The two elder brothers conspire against the third to kill his bride instead and to keep their own families unharmed. It is the third brother’s excessive sense of duty and integrity that does not allow him to fall back on his word, although this means that he must betray his wife. The next morning his young wife rushes to her death by delivering lunch to his workers. All he can do is helplessly watch her being covered in construction material and avert his gaze when she turns to him begging for an explanation. Her unspeakable death nevertheless precludes the murder of innocent children, which would have been even less socially acceptable than the sacrifice of a wife. The legendary edifice is a structure of such importance that large numbers rally to obey an all-pervasive and seemingly absolute authority that dictates every aspect of the edifice construction. The project is shrouded in mystery, and only a few seem to be privy to its purpose. Despite the initial misunderstanding and the offering substitution, the horrific end of the chosen victim is presented as both inevitable and required by the unknown power. This assumed presence of a distinctive and invisible higher authority that allegedly commands the construction makes the edifice’s high-profile sponsors and engineers mere executors of that authority’s will. By being put to a violent death, the woman supposedly protects the physical existence of the edifice—national, religious, or similar monolithic community; family; or even broadly defined “institutions of patriarchal authority.” The call to duty to a higher ideal, to a greater common good, is of such urgency that murder and even the murder of kin by one’s own hand become acceptable. It is this authority that grants the communal project a license (as well as a moral obligation) to exist, while subsequently justifying any measure of violence necessitated for its construction and preservation. No wonder then that the participants, who are simultaneously the executors of this divine testament, perform the sacrificial act for the construction of the edifice/community Introduction

3

with fanatical obedience, regardless of the apparent insanity of the request and the horror at the prospect of murder.3 The higher authority commands obedience with respect to the wife’s social role and an unquestioned subjugation to her husband’s will but also prevails over any and all other loyalties to which the men themselves adhere. It is this authority that is being mediated when the vila or bird calls for the sacrifice to be performed and even determines the nature of the blood offering: “But do not destroy an orphan, a stranger or a traveler: / Destroy instead the loving wife of your own masterbuilder,” commands the bird in the Greek ballad.4 The men most responsible for the edifice’s construction not only have to invest significant effort; they have to suffer emotional loss as well. Yet there is also a clearly articulated sense that their loss can be overcome, just as the wife can be substituted. By being immured into the edifice, the woman disappears from the social scene into the house and marriage and subsequently surrenders herself to a kind of “social death.” Her body literally validates the social contract, just as an oath between two parties in primitive societies is taken over a wounded, penetrated, opened, killed, or in any other way “sacrificed” offering. Thus the symbolic value of the edifice as an institution greatly surpasses its material significance or, for that matter, the value of the human life built into it. However, the men’s eagerness to commit murder, in the name of the authority whose existence and intentions they never interrogate, is motivated not solely by fear but also by opportunism, as well as by the fact that this collective crime camouflages their mutual rivalries and conflicts. Prior to bartering his wife for his ambitious enterprise, and then deceiving her into entering the foundations, the master builder of The Bridge of Arta haggles with the bird over the lives of his entire primary family. Betrayal and rivalry are even more openly denuded in the Serbian epic, where the elder brothers may have priorities other than saving their wives when they decide to deceive their youngest sibling. The reason why the youngest, the most beautiful, and the kindest among the royal wives is condemned to death may lie in the fact that she is the object of desire of all three brothers. Since she is also faithful to her husband, and as such off-limits to the elder brothers, the two erase the evidence of their unlawful desire by confining her to a monument to their power. Although the legend depicts the youngest brother as another victim of his scheming siblings, his responsibility for his wife’s death lies in his placing personal integrity and kinship above his familial duty. It is clear that antagonism, conflict, and betrayal among the founding members compromise the model of homogeneity that underlies each communal enterprise, yet the Balkan edifice-building narrative makes evident that these



4 Introduction

weaknesses in communal relations must not be exposed. The request for a sacrifice therefore serves to cover up conflict. Sacrifice conveniently transposes the conflict onto the ideological plane, where any perceptible disagreement with or departure from collective ideology is represented as a threat to the very communal project. Each member of the community finds him- or herself under constant pressure to demonstrate loyalty to the hegemonic and unitary narrative lest she or he should be recognized as that discursively constructed difference who subverts the communal foundations. In the decisive dealing with this discordant principle that carries the potential to usurp the dull but comfortable stability of imaginary collective identity, difference (racial, gendered, sexual, political, class, or otherwise) is produced, destroyed, and buried in the deepest recesses of collective memory. Both the perpetrators and the victims of the communal enterprise eventually come to share a sense of inevitability and imperative collaboration with the incomprehensible demands made by the invisible authority. The edifice builders shed a tear or two at their wives’ suffering and random death, but none of them ever questions the choice of victims or attempts to rescue them. The victims themselves are forced to accept their end without asking too many questions. Neither of the wives is offered an explanation for the immurement, even when they plead with their husbands for a clue about their punishment. Faced with a conspiratorial silence, the women must reconcile themselves to at least dying with whatever dignity and courage they are able to muster.

The Creative Spirit of the Brotherhood of Men The burial of a live female body—the forceful removal of woman from the social sphere—is not an end in itself. Rather, it acts as the central metaphor of the building enterprise that is initiated, created, executed, and subverted by desire, competition, tensions, and anxiety among the brotherhood of men and for the brotherhood of men.5 Italo Calvino’s story about the City of Desire depicts these social and gender dynamics outside the Balkan context. Calvino’s city is an impassable labyrinth of entangled streets recreating a path from the shared dream of all humanity. Men from all corners of the world dreamed of pursuing an elusive female, whose face they never saw and whose naked body was hidden by her long hair. Instead of finding her, the men find each other, follow their mutual desire, and gather together at the same spot to build the city in which they will finally capture the woman, who is desire itself. But as each of them constructs the city from the blueprint of his own dream, the streets end up convoluted and unnavigable; at

Introduction

5

the spot where each man lost the dream woman from sight, they create a confinement from which she could never again escape. As the city evolves and begins to function like a place of daily life and work, more people following their own desire pour in, and the place loses its appeal. Newcomers keep constructing alleys of their own dreams’ pursuit, until the whole city becomes an ugly trap in which both escape and imagination are rendered impossible. Incessant alterations and modifications of the city only further alienate the edifice from those who claim credit for the construction of the original structure. We never learn whether Calvino’s builders stand up to those others in defense of their own community, changed beyond recognition by newcomers’ strange dreams, alien customs, and prohibitive desires. But we do learn that the shared dream-desire of male builders is the desire for the meeting and visionary union of men with similar power-driven creative goals. Woman is a metaphor for desire, not for her body or for the woman herself, but for liberty, togetherness, a community (of men), all of which is eventually compromised. The dream itself, the reason why the edifice is built and the efforts wasted, is forgotten as if it had never existed. The sacrifice of a living thing generally takes place at times and in situations when the social pact lacks a referential object.6 If a body is violated for a nascent community on the threshold of being established, then this sacrificial act falls under the definition of a “founding act of violence.” Sacrifice is not performed for an extant entity or for an achieved idea, but only for a concept that is still a distant promise or that has as of yet no referent in objective reality.7 Such unsubstantiated constructs belong to a distinctly social and cultural symbolic and are therefore invested with a metaphysical meaning whose significance only increases with the fact that they cannot be related to the material world. A body, a corpus, dies for an incorporate construct. There is no material bridge, even less a city. The bridge, the church, the monastery, or the city walls are all fictitious yet more real than the very material and bleeding bodies that are incessantly surrendered to them, dedicated to the sustenance and perpetuation of this imaginary edifice. However, to their devoted members, such constructs are more “real” than reality itself, and the act of sacrifice presupposes the suspension of the individual’s cognitive and critical faculties for the sake of the tribal unitary spirit.8 Likewise, sacrifice is also an act of corporeal destruction whose meaning is appropriated by the existing community for the purpose of (re)establishing the social contract that has been revoked or suspended due to a crisis. Sacrifice is employed as a means of repressing others—of eliminating difference, which at the point of birth, crisis, or transformation of one social construct into another is seen as in some way undermining the narrative recognized by a community’s

6 Introduction

adherents as their unitary law. Sacrificial economy that thoroughly dominates the ideological communal project is activated for the purpose of the confirmation of the social pact, as a remedy for social crises, or as a solution for the reestablishment of suspended social order. Most of the material I discuss in this book relates to precisely such unstable communities undergoing an acute identity crisis: a foreign threat, a civil war, a repressive government, or even sweeping economic and political changes. Of course, a crisis is the point at which the lack of strength and coherence in an organized structure is most evident. Crisis is also the time when community, seeking to regain the unity whose absence it acutely feels, intensifies aggressive requests for its members’ loyalty and subsequently demonstrates even less tolerance for dissent than usual.9 This under no circumstances means that a community does not call for sacrifices when not undergoing an acute crisis; on the contrary, it constantly seeks them in confirmations of allegiance, consent, and its members’ sense of belonging. In fact, the only way for a community to sustain itself and to justify its existence is to keep the crisis going and demand more sacrifices, austerity, self-control, and self-repression from its constitutive bodies.10 Community’s eternally incipient and undefined state therefore exposes the crisis inherent in every idea that in reality lacks a solid “origin” (foundation) and therefore seeks to construct one. The very notion that an architectural metaphor can serve as a reinforcement of an otherwise unsubstantiated concept is what Kojin Karatani defines as the “will to architecture,” which he recognizes as inherent in Western thought and its philosophy from Plato onward. Karatani makes the point that the “will to architecture” is “reiterated and renewed at times of crisis.”11 Every edifice without sound grounds, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reveals itself as impossible to maintain and in a constant urge for redefinition, reinvention, and modification of its starting premises. Thus the “will to construct a solid edifice,” as Karatani states, “ultimately does not achieve a foundation, but reveals instead the very absence of its own foundation.”12 However, while Karatani’s metaphysical edifices, just like material ones, always and necessarily depend on communication, “dialogue,” and “relationship with the other,” the space for the sacrifice of the other opens precisely in the vacuum caused by the absence of a tolerant and productive relationship among the entity that “wills” the construct, the community that builds it, and the sacrificial victim. The Balkan legend of sacrifice thus becomes metaphorical for the construction of an entity or an idea, while the sponsor of the edifice, or the master builder, is revealed to be as much a visionary as an ideologue. In this space of literal or figurative elimination, the victim occupies a Introduction

7

liminal position vis-à-vis the community that requires her sacrifice. The victim’s liminality is crucial to the social economy my book analyzes, as this project does not attend to politically symbolic sacrifices or signifying bodies, regardless of their clout or political significance. I also do not take into consideration the important category of the voluntary sacrifice as a political act.13 Quite the opposite, this volume is circumscribed by the act of sacrifice of the politically marginal, frequently invisible subject. Meanings assigned to the victimized bodies explored in this book differ from those of historical personages whose oversignifying corpses have been and continue to be used as symbols marking the limits of the national territory or that in multiple other ways “stabilize the landscape and temporarily freeze particular values in it.”14 In recent history we have been witness to several cases of political burials, reburials, and even thefts of corpses of political and religious leaders in the Balkans, instances that were clearly staged as spectacles with an important underlying statement, yet these are not of interest for my discussion.15 This book also distances itself from the “political lives of corpses” exhumed from mass graves and reburied with ceremony, as poignant reminders of the (usually preceding) regimes’ repressive practices.16 These latter victims have significance for my discussion only inasmuch as the people sacrificed, while living, were designated as “pathogens” and were consequently sacrificed to the alleged “purity” of a nationalist, religious, or political communitybuilding cause, precisely on account of the perceived difference or threat they allegedly represented. The sacrificed body presented for the purpose of steadying a community’s foundations is remarkable because it is discerned as failing to fully incorporate itself within the community’s clearly outlined interpellatory limits or, alternatively, consciously rejects the social contract, and the obligations and rights that accompany it, and consequently becomes a victim of ostracism. Its exceptionality lies precisely in the fact of its perceptible (or imaginary) otherness, its nonbelonging, or in the subversive difference it may represent to the overall existence of the structure. The sacrificial act itself assumes the form of the body’s forced integration into that structure—as either a corpse or the living dead.17 A question that logically imposes itself is whether an entity can sacrifice something that is not part of it, its own, and therefore whether a body that has never been part of a community proper can be considered as an appropriate sacrifice for the establishment, reinforcement, and solidification of its imaginary totality. While the logic of sacrifice operates on the premise of homogeneity, demanding that undesirable components be dealt with in a radical manner, the parallel logic is that the other is never inassimilably



8 Introduction

alien but is instead always and necessarily part of ourselves as well.18 Each individual is required to sacrifice in her- or himself the part that is other and inassimilable because only then will she or he be able to partake of privileged insider status. However, this site of victimization is also characterized by impermanence, and the position of marginality can likewise be occupied by those who only recently enjoyed the relative safety of the prevalent and integrated majority. The texts I discuss point to the fact that every community member is likewise potentially a sacrificial offering for the collective. Frequently shifting sociopolitical paradigms create conditions under which any community member can also be called to sacrifice her- or himself for the benefit of the edifice. The body is thus subject to repression and forceful inscription of meaning both in rituals of daily life and in what is commonly defined as “history.” The sacrificial economy underlies the incessantly shifting and only seemingly radically changing political-historical landscape, as well as the limited space within this confinement left for individual assertion and the potential subversion of repressive communal laws. Part of my analysis also deals with these invisible mechanisms of coercion by which a community keeps its members compliant within its complicated structure and by which it deters dissent.

Community, Communalism, Capitalism In the plurality of Balkan tradition(s) the legend of sacrificial immurement occupies a very prominent place, even though the legend is not indigenous to the region and even though its metaphorical meaning is not unknown at other, sometimes very distant locales.19 A great deal of the philological and literary attention dedicated to the legend has dealt with its dispersion and origin and even more with the semantics of the bridge, the edifice that is prevalent in most Balkan versions of the legend. It has been the subject of many regional scholarly studies, and not infrequently it has received the treatment of a metanarrative whose origins are tied to an existing architectural edifice and utilized as an explanation of concrete historical events or personages. In its popular Serbian and Greek versions, the legend was recorded by folklorists and anthropologists: Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864), the reformer of the Serbian alphabet and the man credited with the adoption of the vernacular as the language of literature and culture, and George Megas (1893–1976), a Greek ethnologist.20 More recently, Mircea Eliade famously worked on Romania’s widespread version, Master Manole.21 The legend is known throughout the Balkans and exists in different forms even in Hungary and Cyprus. Some more recent research links the origin of the narrative

Introduction

9

to ancient Indian legends in which the woman dies not in an architectural edifice, but in a water spring. The purpose of her sacrifice is the sustenance of a community threatened by extinction due to natural causes.22 No Balkan variant of the legend implies such a natural threat, yet there is an obvious sense of urgency in the demand for a human sacrifice needed to patch up an “edifice” that is on the point of implosion. The Balkans are still a region in which people by necessity organize their lives around communities, having been historically thrown into various imperial state projects characterized by disregard for minorities’ political autonomy or cultural affiliations. A point that hardly needs mentioning is that this fertile cultural heterogeneity has frequently been manipulated into a human and political tragedy in which collective ethnic or religious interests allegedly demand declarations of loyalty and literal sacrifices. Small wonder then that the people(s) of the Balkans have traditionally developed stronger communal bonds or an almost proverbial distrust of centralized state authority.23 It is logical to assume that this is one of the reasons why the myth of the building of an important, endlessly postponed structure, paid for in blood, would acquire such a broad dispersion in the region. The legend’s existence in so many different versions and locales can be attributed to the specificity of the history of the region, to the beautiful but explosive mix of its populations and cultures, and to the existence of communities of differing makeups that have long lived alongside each other although rarely with each other. I read the sacrificial economy underlying the building enterprise as the creation or confirmation of the social contract, while the architectural structure in which the woman is buried alive signifies a communal organization whose permanence is enabled and guaranteed by her blood. Community is broadly understood as a type of organization that lies beyond precise sociological definitions that circumscribe entities of human organization but is instead founded on inevitability (family) or on people’s own perceptions and affiliations (diaspora community, nation, closely knit religious group, etc.)— namely, on the ties and relationships that members of a community imagine, create, and perpetuate among themselves. Its form, organization, and rules are elusive and difficult to define, yet its effects are visible and even visceral. In most definitions, community stands for a type of organization built on the basis of perceptions of shared commonalities (kinship, culture, territory), resting on solidarity among its members. Not infrequently and much less benevolently, it is also perceived as a crowd, a herd, a mob. Community lacks the dimension of individual self-interest that is considered to be the basis of legally administered societies and is by some critics of nationalism seen as an archaic and rigid predecessor of modern nation-states and nationalist

10 Introduction

ideologies.24 It is precisely due to the existence of collective rather than personal interest that community can and does demand sacrifices from any and all of its participants.25 As such, community surpasses the legal framework of civil society, that other and predominantly voluntary form of human association, whose repressive mechanisms mitigate external manifestations of dissent yet leave some space for personal preference and relative individual freedom.26 In contrast to civil society, whose visible form is the organized state apparatus, community commands allegiance and imposes itself as the ultimate referent of its members’ duty and affection. Its appeal is emotional and visceral, although administratively it is mainly unregulated. However, communal interference or competition with the administrative apparatus is more a rule than an exception, and in many cases community exists as a parallel institution to the legally sanctioned bodies of a civil society, whose laws are not infrequently overridden by much more ancient and rooted communal traditions. Thus the most obvious distinction between a society and a community is the absence that community demonstrates of the administrative and legal apparatus, backbone and guarantor of the stability of every society. This is not to say, however, that community must be volatile, as it is likewise regulated by its own norms. It also does not mean that any wellorganized society is free from communalist tensions or that a state cannot and does not function like a restrictive community, as will become clearer from my discussion.27 Although sacrifice—the physical destruction of bodies—is the most extreme form of “purification” against unwanted elements, most social entities regularly exercise cleansing by bureaucratic means. Administrative exclusion, increasingly and with ever more hostility applied against undocumented workers, refugees, immigrants, or otherwise disenfranchised individuals, is the pivotal point at which the most developed of societies expose their mode of functioning to be little else than primitive communalist protectionism shrouded in legal jargon. Regardless of their “bloodlessness,” such insidious administrative (legal) forms of discrimination and cleansing are barely less inhumane, and their ultimate effects not infrequently lead to the same deadly outcome.28 Even though this ever-growing and ever-morerepressive stance taken against undesirable social elements in contemporary societies is explained by the current moment of economic and demographic crisis, the rationale that supposedly justifies discrimination by the application of law or force (or both) is neither new nor caused by any unprecedented global crisis. The global demographic crisis that we are witnessing is merely evidence of the metamorphosing of the modern state’s principles of bio- into necropolitics.29 Modern sovereign states only further modernized and made Introduction

11

more efficient the procedures of dealing with foreign and undesirable bodies, while both the ultimate goal of their elimination and the underlying racist ideology remained unaltered. What I define as the example of repressive communalism is a more evident and parallel development of the necropolitics practiced by the increasingly bureaucratized state apparatus.30 Despite the fact that the designation “the Balkans” appears frequently here as a carrier of meaning and a signifier for a plurality of related traditions and cultures, the literary and film material I choose to discuss originates primarily, though not exclusively, in Greece and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. This is due to my personal judgment that the histories of these (for most of the twentieth century) two countries provide the best illustrations for my argument. While it is commonplace to a banal extreme to state that the history of this region is “turbulent” or “tragic,” Yugoslavia and Greece, especially in their post–World War II political development, provide paradigms of a greater social dynamic than other Balkan countries that spent most of the period in question under some form of either proSoviet or locally grown totalitarian regime and emerged out of these predicaments relatively peacefully, at least compared to the bloodbath that marked the death of Yugoslavia. Greece, on the other hand, politically part of the West ever since its philhellenic rediscovery over two centuries ago, has shown everything but the stability that makes the West a proverbial model of statehood and governance. Instead, in this historically brief time, Greece has literally dashed through the whole spectrum of political developments—from a procommunist uprising, to foreign interventionism, civil war, military dictatorship, and terrorism, to the violent forms of civil unrest and xenophobia that have shocked the society most recently and are growing increasingly serious even as I write this. These facts testify to deep divisions and instability at the foundations of Greek political society that are of extraordinary interest for the subject of this volume. On a broader scale, the legend of sacrifice and other narratives that build on its original theme have gained fresh relevance with the most recent demographic and political consequences of immigration, growing unemployment, looming or already effective budgetary crisis, social stratification, and widespread dissatisfaction and protests. These developments have in their own way refueled communalist tendencies and protectionism over territorial, economic, or cultural claims, a phenomenon that is also emphatically global, rather than in any way being confined to the Balkans. For this reason it is legitimate to see the legend of immurement as an archetype of cross-cultural value that represents the foundation myths of human communities as such, while all evidence suggests that it is naïve to expect the bankruptcy of communalist ideologies.

12 Introduction

My choice of the “Balkans” as a designation for the trope of communal sacrifice is guided by the geographical and cultural space that the Balkans represent. The Balkans I concentrate on are not the seat of some exotic specificity or, alternatively, of despicable political practices that exist in glaring disproportion with the “civilized world.” It has often been repeated that in the Balkans, unlike in the West, mythologies are still recognized as an integral part of the life they inform. This has been explained as a consequence of Balkan nations’ not having had the luxury to allow their history of suffering and sacrifice to sink into oblivion and turn into a pragmatic pursuit of political alliances and interests. Nowadays the Balkans are commonly associated with a propensity to chauvinist separatism. So too are the frequently conflated concepts of community and communalism. Seismic shifts that occurred as a consequence of the fall of communism, the failure of Yugoslav multicultural community, and the pains and trials of the multiplicity of Balkan nation-states in the process of EU integration have once again tested the fragile balance of national borders, weak economies, and precarious cultural tolerance, which seemed frozen in a time capsule during the Cold War. As a result, there appeared a new imperative for community restructuring and redefinition, which left the gate wide open to the resurrection of the most repressive and deadly forms of communalism. Yugoslav dissolution wars and atrocities committed in the name of ethnoreligious definition have become eponymous of such negative communalist tendencies. As much as these processes have acquired a “Balkan” identification—whether through specific historical events or even through crudely exaggerated abstractions and stereotypes of great associative power—the sacrificial economy that keeps reappearing in the Balkan narratives I analyze here in fact points very much to European and global historical developments.31 One such recent example is media interest in the rise of Greek right-wing sentiment, embodied in the Golden Dawn party. Although more or less marginal right-wing phenomena have always been part of the European political landscape, the Golden Dawn is broadly publicized as yet another instance of un-European Balkan intolerance, which goes hand-in-hand with the nation’s proverbial lack of discipline and credit unworthiness. Proclamations and violent actions against immigrants by Golden Dawn thus receive broad media consideration, while the fact that, for example, the states of Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland return planeloads of Roma and other “false asylum seekers” to Serbia passes virtually unmentioned anywhere, save among the Serbian public (likewise generally inclined toward these minorities’ silent disappearance). I am thus more apt to read the unabated relevance of the subject of sacrifice in the philosophical, anthropological, and sociological field in general as a consequence Introduction

13

of exponentially growing insecurities the individual subjectivity faces in the always precarious and potentially explosive political moment on the global scale. The very definition of a national/ethnic community faces multiple challenges from globalization processes in the complex interchange of the political and economic ideologies of nationalism and capitalism. A gradual and inevitable obliteration of the nation-state and its replacement by some form of capitalist monetary union has long been hailed as a solution for particularist ideologies of all hues. What we are witnessing nowadays, however, is that these ideological premises are returning into official administrative practices, part and parcel of both Western and non-Western politics, with the stigma of racial or cultural supremacism carefully sanitized by neoliberal jargon. It is not just in the Balkans but worldwide that a new paranoid and increasingly chauvinistic politics has again been utilizing the banner of the “protection of national interests” (economic, political, or cultural) to reinforce ideological positions.32 No longer the prerogative of Western nations (and nation-states), which have utilized racism-by-other-names in the protection of “European [Christian, democratic] heritage” or the “American way of life,” chauvinism now proudly features in the struggle for the “purity of Islamic laws” and in any and every similar particularist position. It has become a method of effectively dealing with undesired social phenomena and of imposing ever more rigid safeguards against internal dissent, as well as external challenges. Any given community today presents its condition as one of perpetual crisis. This phenomenon is becoming more evident in the state of global capitalism and in fact denudes the elitist interests behind communal projects. It is in capitalist modernity that sacrifice assumes its undeniably deadliest and most absurd form in the massive destruction of designated social “pathogens” and also, paradoxically, of the community’s own, who sacrifice themselves (or are collectively sacrificed) for their motherland/fatherland, their religious or political beliefs, or even a “way of life”—according to George W. Bush’s (in)famous formula in the “war on terror.”33 In fact, the very design of this ultimate incarnation of the sacrificial act demonstrates a clear anatomy of capitalist production/expulsion cycles in which every redundancy is unsentimentally discarded without remainder. Meanwhile, the ideology triggering various forms of communalist chauvinism is revealed as little else than crude manipulation that barely hides the concentration of power within elite groups, aggressive eradication of political transparency, and rampant encroachment upon human rights and civil liberties. As an anticommunal force, neoliberal capitalism has invaded and apparently undermined the texture of traditional communal life, which forces community to keep

14 Introduction

reinventing and redefining itself in increasingly protective, rigid, and crude forms—a phenomenon that only further deepens its state of crisis. This is only a false paradox, however, as many have noticed, because neoliberal capitalism and ethnoreligious nationalism are not each other’s extreme opposites and in fact have more in common than meets the eye.34 Furthermore, the application of the capitalist logic of expulsion in attempted counternarratives by anticapitalist ideological communities in most recent history testifies to its efficiency in various forms of terror, execution, and extermination, a tendency that becomes even more striking in such failed experiments’ ultimate return to the ground zero of capitalist production. Communalism and its accompanying phenomena—resentment, virulent chauvinism, violence—therefore emerge as symptoms of capitalism, which utilizes them as weapons of control and manipulation of the masses. Former Eastern European societies, especially Yugoslav heir states, are almost eponymous of this development brought about by the neoliberal eradication of the social state and the aggressive (and NATO-assisted) introduction of predatory capitalism. However, the unwillingness of some religious communities to reject capitalist practices, despite their proclamations to the contrary, is even more symptomatic. Namely, both neoliberal capitalism and ethnoreligious nationalism share a common interest in attenuating the disturbance caused by class conflict, the former for the purpose of its own perpetuation, the latter seemingly achieving this goal by eliminating the individual differences of those who partake in the collective.35 Neither goes about this task by abolishing classes themselves but instead by offering an escape from class reality into a world of their characteristic remedies: capitalism through the overproduction of goods and the desire for them, which, as Marcuse wrote long ago, leaves the real problems of social stratification blissfully undisturbed, simultaneously creating ever-new spaces for expansion, either by coercion or by military interventionism.36 Ethnoreligious nationalism, on the other hand, offers its own version of retreat from extreme materialism into a falsely spiritual and egalitarian pursuit of communal identity, which in extreme forms demands self-sacrifice from its followers in the spreading of belief by acts of the mass sacrifices of those who do not share it. These two social models, which currently present the only options of escape from each other’s excesses and obvious shortcomings, are in fact not extreme opposites, as they are frequently portrayed, and neither represents an answer to the other’s problems. With the political left unable or unwilling to envision an option outside of this political dichotomy, humanity is at present split between the two right-wing alternatives that have long overstayed their arguable historical utility. Introduction

15

Contemporary Narratives of Sacrifice The sacrificial metaphor is without doubt among the most productive metaphors in use in official and popular national narratives, regardless of cultural or historical differences. However, in this volume I present the sacrificial metaphor as a counternarrative to the national(ist) one by focusing on the actual victim of the crime. Instead of concentrating on heroic sacrifices for the motherland, honor, or the people, this work brings to the surface the anonymous victim, excluded from the rhetoric of heroism, and frequently from the communal narrative as well. More often than not this victim has either an ironic stance toward the historic event for which she or he is about to die or downplays its significance despite being aware of the human cost involved in grand abstract ideas. The narratives I have chosen are contemporary and situated in historically turbulent times (which in the case of the Balkans is pretty much any time) and amid political changes that seek unambiguous declarations of loyalty as much as unprecedented sacrifices of the participating subject. Despite the fact that they do not always pay homage to the immurement legend itself, these narratives prove the timeless persistence of the sacrificial economy in history and as part of the mostly unchanging human condition. When making a selection of what material to include, I was faced with a vast amount of texts and films, which deal with various episodes in the past century’s history of the region. Most of them involve some kind of sacrifice, and many speak from the position of the defeated victim and by those facts alone could have been analyzed here. Those texts that did find their way into this volume possess a dimension of corporeality, of vivid destruction, violation, or brutalization of bodies, especially those that make a determined attempt to inscribe themselves into the communal or historical narrative against prohibitions. Such a sacrificial offering, often an agent of her or his own sacrifice, subverts the notion of the legendary immured victim who is cheated or forced to die yet who purportedly consents with her or his victimization in two ways; either these are victims who are brutally murdered and whose consent for sacrifice is never even nominally requested, or else they determine their own sacrifice by a willing inscription into the communal narrative. The efforts of these latter victims to incorporate their difference in the imaginary communal homogeneity creates a countertext to the erasure of the victim’s body (immurement of a live woman) from the communal narrative (the city or the bridge). In the end the victim remains disillusioned and defeated, or frequently physically destroyed, yet always fully aware of the inevitability of this defeat. The main focus of this book is the sacrificial economy as concentrated

16 Introduction

around the body’s social function and within the boundaries of gender determinism and sexual repression. Feminist criticism holds the female body to be the procreative body of a community/nation that is necessarily abandoned on the threshold of the subject’s entrance into the symbolic order of the male nation. The female body is thus seen as the first and ultimate victim of a patriarchal social structure, whose true identity is always masked by other sacrificed bodies. Yet the female body is also symbolic of the community or nation to the extent that its “boundaries” are considered permeable to contamination by external groups—as was evident in the campaign of mass rapes and forced impregnation of women in the most recent interethnic wars in the Balkans. The repressive sexual economy specifically controls the procreative female body in order to prevent the “contamination” of communal “purity” by other groups, the fear of which increases with the degree of the crisis in which the community finds itself. While acknowledging the validity of feminist critique, however, I challenge the notion of the female victim as a privileged symbol by analyzing multiple other bodies who find themselves at the site of the “sacrificial victim.” Although not necessarily female, they may be defined as feminine, which becomes a marker of social marginality, incorporating bodies that at one point or another find themselves in opposition vis-à-vis the defining hegemonic masculinity monopolizing the social contract.37 Male homosexual bodies come to the forefront as the ultimate threat to the heteronormative model by which a community (re)produces its identity. Minorities, refugees, immigrants, socially subjugated classes, and even the disabled are likewise subject to various degrees of violation of their integrity, administrative removal, or even physical annihilation. The immurement legend in my discussion becomes a powerful and omnipresent metaphor for such bureaucratic or physical violation and discrimination against undesired bodies, while the bodies themselves are a visible reminder of the fragility of communal ideologies based on restrictive and exclusive identities. Such bodies, on the contrary, by necessity offer a glimpse at the possibility of a different community, constructed on heterogeneity and mutual respect of differences. The Balkans, with their rich cultural mix, are an ideal locale for precisely such a community yet also a place where heterogeneity has historically been undermined by communalist ideologies. Literary “bridge texts” by Ivo Andrić (who won the Nobel Prize in 1961), Ismail Kadare (awarded the Booker in 2006), and the always controversial Nikos Kazantzakis famously rewrite the immurement legend in order to explore the historical problem of national identity in the Balkans. In their versions of the immurement legend, the bridge emerges not only as the symbol to which Introduction

17

the Balkans are historically compared but also as a metaphor interiorized by the population of the region. They likewise record the disappearance of the female body as a productive metaphor of community building, while men and conflicts among men come to the forefront of discussion, as communal crisis increasingly becomes embedded in the language of defense or invasion. All these bridge narratives are situated against the ethnic conflicts, wars, ideologies, nationalist uprisings, populist movements, and dictatorships that marked recent Balkan history. Yet, in place of the romantic idealism inherent in ethnoreligious projects, they mostly offer a critical view of the community’s sacrificial imperative. Sacrificial deaths are revealed as little else than cover-ups for elitist profit-making schemes that even bind a paid sacrificial victim with a legal contract. The full power of these texts lies in their social critique of much of the contemporary Balkans as well as the propensity of human communities in general to sabotage the “construction” of peaceful coexistence. These bridges and their respective communities thus fall victim to a combination of economic interests and human pettiness, while their builders either pay the ultimate price themselves or are forced to abandon the very idea of the creation of an inclusive Balkan community. Yugoslavia is the most recent example of a failure of precisely such a multinational/ethnic/religious identity. We cannot even begin to discuss the (inevitable?) disintegration of the inclusive and heterogeneous Yugoslav community without exposing the failures of the socialist revolution and subsequent post-Yugoslav capitalist developments. The multimedia material presented in my discussion reveals a strikingly unchanging pattern of elitist manipulation of the sentiments of the masses, who are mobilized for the protection of economic interests, clothed in ideological jargon. The texts by two exiled Bosnian authors, Miljenko Jergović and Aleksandar Hemon, are in dialogue with films by the older generation of Black Wave filmmakers, such as Dušan Makavejev and Želimir Žilnik, in their critique of lethal nationalisms. Communalist tensions are perceived as the suppression or destruction of the liberating feminine principle by the hegemonic social pact, deeply unstable in its monolithic identity. It conspires to murder in order to provide consensus for its imaginary community. Dead, mutilated, and tortured bodies graphically delineate the boundaries of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space and recall the atrocities that were committed in the name of ethnoreligious communalism. The result of all this fragmentation resembles the Surrealist blind collage technique of the “exquisite corpse” (cadavre exquis), in which a story or image is gradually revealed from its many previously invisible aspects. Such a story/image is never fully coherent and constantly verges on the edge of disintegration. This technique of mismatched collage is emblematic not

18 Introduction

only of perceptions surrounding the existence of the state of Yugoslavia but also of the literary and film narratives about Yugoslavia that I use in my analysis. Without a solid narrative structure, they are constructed around an immense array of protagonists, images, events, locales, and digressions that disclose more details than necessary for a straightforward story. They perform the composite body they narrate and redeploy the sacrificial metaphor for the purpose of embodying the fragmented Yugoslav space. Yugoslavia ultimately emerges as precisely such a cadaver, a misaligned composite rather than a functional entity, which, moreover, dissolved twice in the course of the twentieth century. Other texts in this book delve deeper into the structures that facilitate or perpetuate communal(ist) impositions and identify the family as the first and ultimate agent of restrictive identitarian politics. Such, for example, are the novels by Rhea Galanaki, Eugenia Fakinou, and Elias Maglinis, but also the performance art of Marina Abramović. Each in her or his own way, these authors and artists explore identity through the topos of the father’s testament to the (male) heir, whose monolithic identitarian politics are disturbed by racialized and gendered individuals eager to inscribe themselves within the prohibited space. The only way through which the inassimilable individual effects a visceral inscription of its otherness into the matrix of greater history is by self-sacrifice, which is also a subversion of the hegemonic domination of male testamentary rights. The father and the family are revealed in their dual role, both as the main proponents of identitarian politics and as the victims of that very determination. Much more emphatically than the mother, the father emerges as the main agent willing to sacrifice his offspring to the community’s rigid demands for racial and religious “purity.” In turn, and before realizing its own defeat in the face of historical horror, the disobedient offspring introduces a different tone of historical narration and opens a space for the contestation and interrogation of dominant nationalist fiction. Contestation and challenge abound in the performance space of the always controversial Marina Abramović, who utilizes her own body as the ultimate record of the individual’s sacrifice by and in history. Simultaneously protesting the repressive ideological dictates that leave indelible scars on her (performing) body, Abramović exhibits the defeating truth that the individual’s desire for freedom itself has limitations. The physical body is the ultimate signifier of history on which torture, rape, mutilation, and other forms of violation leave permanent inscriptions that become the body’s only identity. Historical trauma acts as a somatic hereditary disorder to which no individual is immune or can escape. In the current political-historical moment the significance of community Introduction

19

seems to be on the rise, while global capitalist tendencies undermine the very concept of community. In this book I treat this as a false paradox, because growing ethnoreligious communalism that poses as a way out of the oppressive neoliberal capitalist model not only employs that very model in its functioning but is proven to be more repressive than its opponent. I perceive the rigid definition of community as little else than the sectarian protectionism of minor cultural differences and oppressive internal structure that closes the door on the creation of a genuine community. Rather than suggesting a utopian and highly unlikely solution of a rapid change in people’s views and social identifiers, I recognize potential in grassroots efforts at gradual transformation. Genuine change can occur solely on the level of organizations that uphold the interests of local communities, both against neoliberal centralization of capital and governance and against cultural communalism of any kind. The sheer diversity of multimedial material discussed in this book, material that was either created in or refers to likewise diverse historical periods, events, or geographical locales, is intended to demonstrate the extent to which sacrificial economy is not restricted to myths and ritual practices, but is very much part of every individual’s experience of history.



20 Introduction

Chapter 1 Community , Power, and the Body

Anthropological, feminist, and even psychoanalytical studies frequently posit the motif of human sacrifice as a culturally nonspecific event, as a “civilizational” act par excellence. Many of their propositions are in tune with the imagery found in the Balkan legend of immurement. The well-known Freudian establishing of parricide as the founding social event in Totem and Taboo (1913) stipulates the origin of society as disloyalty to the father and subsequent conflict and rivalry among brothers. Freud’s sacrificial victim is the mythical aging and weakened patriarch/king, whose social position is challenged by younger and healthier men. By sacrificing the father (and consuming his body) the sons have already created a community founded on guilt over the common crime that will be expiated in ever-new cycles of sacrifice. There is no place for women in this exchange, and they merely change hands from father to sons in the process of the transfer of power. Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972) likewise recognizes sacrifice in the very foundation of society and its rituals, yet he does not consider the gender or status of the victim as significant. He notes that civilization is inextricably linked with violence through sacrificial mechanisms and that everything known 21

to us—our cultural institutions, rituals, and linguistic structure—occludes murder. In Girard’s work the indeterminacy of the nature of the sacrificial victim is such that Girard barely distinguishes between human and animal sacrifices; animals are even frequently substituted as surrogates for human sacrifices or murdered as accidental victims of accumulated rage at the perpetrator’s inability to vent his or her anger at a human. In fact, Girard sees most sacrificial victims as surrogates: animals or objects absorb the violence intended for a human, aliens are targeted by the violence intended for the preservation of internal social order but channeled away from the community’s integrated members. Feminism, especially in its older and more radical forms, refocuses our attention on the Balkan narrative by insisting that our whole symbolic order is founded on the murder of woman/mother at the threshold of the explicitly patriarchal (and frequently chauvinist) communal project. In attempts to displace male ownership of the symbolic, radical feminism places the female sacrifice as the original and ultimate foundation of the symbolic order, thus privileging the female victim over others. Any other sacrificed body necessarily substitutes for the actual and original victim, who in feminist readings is always a woman/mother. In spite of Freud, feminism insists that the original sacrifice was represented not by the murder of the father, but by the institutionalized, legalized, and normativized suppression of the mother’s/female body. As Luce Irigaray states, “when Freud talks about the father being torn apart by the sons in the primeval horde, isn’t he, out of full-scale denial and misunderstanding, forgetting the woman who has been torn between son and father, among sons?”1 Woman becomes an appropriate sacrificial victim only through male domination and ownership of her body, which gives it the value of the liminal status of a femina sacra. Hélène Cixous likewise denies the phallus its purported centrality as the signifier, the position it holds in psychoanalytical theory, and situates the mother at the locus of feminine writing.2 She thus exposes and deconstructs female sacrifice as the foundation stone of the patriarchal social/national project, as well as the totality of the systems of knowledge on which humanity is founded. To a certain extent this may be interpreted as simple reversal of the gendered role of the systems of knowledge and language that does little else but create a feminist utopia, complete with instruments of particular female literary creation untouched by the phallogocentric universe. The task of women’s writing, Cixous states, is to dismantle the “solidarity of logocentrism and phallocentrism” by “bringing to light of the fate which has been imposed upon woman, of her burial—to threaten the stability of the masculine edifice which passed itself off as eternalnatural; by bringing forth from

,

,

22 Community Power and the Body

the world of femininity reflections, hypotheses which are necessarily ruinous for the bastion which still holds the authority. What would become of logocentrism, of the great philosophical systems, of world order in general if the rock upon which they founded their church were to crumble?”3 According to this direction of feminism, the ritual-mythical exclusion of the female element from the public sphere is interpreted through the power struggle over the social domain; over systems of knowledge; and, ultimately, over the right to define, name, and control reality. In other words, the Balkan legend of immurement is evocative of the imposition of what the Lacanian psychoanalytical approach designates as the symbolic realm, the Law of the Father, over the semiotic realm, which is manifested as the irrational, primordial rhythm of the maternal body, predating the paternal, logocentric, and cultural reality. Julia Kristeva, whose early work tends to create a manageable balance between radical feminist and patriarchal views, criticizes staunch feminists for the fallacy of imagining a universe uncorrupted by shared language (and therefore passed down as the Law of the Word to men and women alike). Although attuned to the almost impossible situation of female users of language, Kristeva allows for some very limited and hardly subversive female agency but never ventures far beyond the rigid boundaries delineated by the great fathers of psychoanalysis. Kristeva claims that the patriarchal economy “requires that women be excluded from the single true and legislating principle, namely the Word,” which renders them mute and obedient within a system that is at liberty to use, abuse, and dispose of their reproductive/ sexual bodies.4 Kristeva envisages the semiotic element (supposedly close to the feminine principle) not as a direct opposition and competition to the symbolic order, but as its predecessor, which creates conditions for the subject’s successfully joining the symbolic. Following Lacan, whose concept of the symbolic necessitates the abolition of the semiotic, Kristeva claims that the social/symbolic order substitutes the semiotic in a rather violent linguistic event that creates both the order itself, now forever characterized by violence and murder at its foundation, and its ultimate symbol—the female victim—excluded from view and from any real social significance: “[Sacrifice] puts an end to previous (semiotic, presymbolic) violence, and, by focusing violence on a victim, displaces it onto the symbolic order at the very moment this order is being founded. Sacrifice sets up the symbol and the symbolic order at the same time, and this ‘first’ symbol, the victim of a murder, merely represents the structural violence of language’s irruption as the murder of soma, the transformation of the body, the captation of drives.”5 Through the process of defilement of the female body, the community launches a set of substitutions that conceal the fact that the victim is always a woman/mother: Community, Power, and the Body

23

“[woman is] socialized, even revolutionary, but at the cost of the body . . . on the one hand, the aphasic pleasure of childbirth that imagines itself a participant in the cosmic cycles; on the other, jouissance under the symbolic weight of a law (paternal, familial, social, divine) of which she is the sacrificed support, bursting with glory on the condition that she submit to the denial, if not the murder, of the body.”6 However, Kristeva does not allow the semiotic to disappear completely. Instead, it continues to exist, albeit suppressed, and to run its parallel course with the dominant paradigm, occasionally causing mostly minor disturbances that possess no power to significantly disturb, even less so overturn, the symbolic order. She relegates any such extreme scenarios to the pool of radical feminist utopian fantasies that reject what she sees as a fact: that there exists neither the outside of language (and thus no possibility for a radically different social order) nor any kind of other language that could compete with the one that patriarchy utilizes as its creative impulse and its law.7 The semiotic, therefore, can only create ruptures in the symbolic logic and cause the language to suffer relatively controlled subversions, experienced as recurrence of various “disorderly” phenomena: nonsense speech, rhythm, silences, and so on. The female principle continues its existence, but exclusively as a symbol of the new order and rid of any genuine power. Psychoanalytic readings interpret the dynamic of nocturnal damage on the edifice and the subsequent immurement of a wife as a deeper primeval fear of feminine and natural energies. The fear is so strong that it necessitates the creation of a network of taboos and prohibitions in service of an intricate system of repression (of gender and other perceptible difference). Alan Dundes chooses to interpret the motif of erecting an edifice in the Balkan legend as the men’s attempt, and subsequent failure, to maintain an erection— ergo, “natural” dominance in society. According to Dundes, the efforts of the builders symbolize those of patriarchal law to establish power over family and social life as a whole. The immurement of woman, signifying her safe removal from the social sphere and confinement within the limited scope of household and family duties, results in the suppression of men’s archetypal fear of sexual failure and secures their social primacy.8 The edifice becomes synonymous with patriarchal power that is deconstructed by night, the very time when a man has to prove his manhood. The failure of the builders to erect a structure that can stand by itself and endure a night without damage suggests their failed attempts to establish firm patriarchal rule. When culture consequently emulates nature, as Dundes states, and fails to imitate its creative function, it inevitably turns destructive. In its confrontation with nature, patriarchy attempts to appropriate feminine reproductive powers,

,

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24 Community Power and the Body

embodied in “woman-as-nature,” and by this act render woman redundant. All it is capable of creating, however, is an artifice, an architectural construct that is, moreover, incapable of standing by itself. Woman finds herself in a paradoxical situation vis-à-vis culture since this social/cultural construction takes place without and outside of her who is (in) the very foundations of the process itself, yet she can also be subversive and represent a potential threat. However, the subversion woman is capable of achieving is limited and mainly reinforces her own embeddedness within the patriarchal structure. The wife in the Greek ballad curses the undertaking but revokes the curse when reminded that her brother could pass by on his way from foreign lands. The Serbian princess first offers her mother’s gold and slave girls in exchange for her life and then tries to buy some time by implying that the continuation of her husband’s lineage is possible only thanks to her son. However, having already fulfilled her social function and produced an heir for her husband, her life does not matter any longer. She thus begs for the final concession by the builders: that windows be left for her breasts, so that she can nurse her infant, and for her eyes, so that she can look at him. This wish is granted, and she survives within the structure for as long as her infant son needs her. Her life inside the patriarchal structure is thus strictly determined by the usability of her physical body for the extension of patriarchal lineage. The builders in the Balkan legend of immurement are involved in a broader context of constructing a patriarchal system of values, literally constructed over a female body, whose value is being symbolically sublimated at the same time as it is being removed from public life. This dual process represents a “de facto political and structural exclusion of women,” considered to be a guarantee of the “flow and sustenance of the patriarchal symbolic capital.”9 Immured in the foundations of the symbolic order (bridge/city/ monastery), woman-as-body/symbol performs a double function—natural and social. Her body’s appropriation by the patriarchal symbolic order follows a twofold process: woman (un)willingly lends her natural and social bod(ies) to serve as the foundation stone of an architectural masterpiece, but on a larger scale, she becomes the foundation of a new historical order as well. Both her bodies remain safely enclosed within a manmade creation that resembles a “womb-tomb,” as Dundes names it, a male womb that gives forth death rather than life. By submitting herself to her husband’s ambition to participate in his architectural/social undertaking, woman becomes the foundation not only of the family lineage but also of the social structure. In the patriarchal economy women thus structured are only capable of retaining existence at the level of the symbolic, or, as Iveković claims, as “phenomenon, image, [or] apparition.”10 Women are still not the absolute opposite to Community, Power, and the Body

25

this collective body, although they find themselves in a position of a double agent within the community: their reproductive function guarantees their position as “internal others,” which is a site of ultimate subversion designating women as a constant threat to the community’s monolithic integrity, as their bodies are also capable of producing the offspring of an other: “Women cannot take part in the reproduction of this (patriarchal) sameness, unless they erase their own presence and role as individual, sex and gender: they will therefore be treated as matter, sheer body, or instrument, and will have to be silent in the way ‘Mother Nation’ or ‘the Virgin’ are: giving birth to nation-and-narration (i.e., to identity through language), or to logos—the word of God.”11 The male subject, on the other hand, is required to successfully abject the mother’s body and become part of a community of the self/ same. This is how community smoothly, though not untraumatically, substitutes for the individual’s primeval bond with the mother.

The Female Body and Communal Identity Underlying the need of almost every patriarchal community to more or less strictly control and, if necessary, repress female sexuality is the male anxiety of “betrayal” by the woman-reproducer of communal identity. “Betrayal” is an ideological weapon utilized to impose a more systematic control over the female body. It is particularly telling in the case of postsocialist European societies, where it disturbs the simple narrative of liberation or transformation from “totalitarianism” into a society purportedly based on care for the individual. Svetlana Slapšak and Katherine Verdery discuss fascinatingly irrational accusations directed at women in postsocialist societies regarding their alleged role in “perpetuating communism,” which is only a vaguely curtained discourse aimed at the repatriarchalization of these societies and the reintroduction of institutionalized curbing of women’s rights, granted largely for the purpose of recruiting women into the much-needed labor force, by former communist/socialist regimes.12 Most postsocialist and largely nationalist societies followed the identical scenario of divesting women of their hard-won political rights by refocusing attention on women’s natural functions as mothers and providers. Some have even taken considerable legal steps to abolish abortion, all the while counting the victims of women’s “complicity with communists” in the unprecedented “genocide” of their respective national beings. However, concern with low birth rates, or the “white plague,” as it is referred to in some Balkan societies, is not entirely a postcommunist phenomenon, but in fact a broader issue in many largely traditionalist communities that in times of economic or political crisis express an unusual concern with the behavior of the female, as well as

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26 Community Power and the Body

other nonnormativized social bodies.13 Greece represents another fascinating case, having in recent decades found itself in a new situation of accommodating a large influx of immigrants and an aging population, while at the same time still feeling anxiety about its large, powerful, and historically antagonistic neighbor Turkey. The interest of the Greek public in the performance of female bodies is not new and has only gained momentum since the law legalizing abortion was passed in the 1980s, when the number of abortions performed in Greece each year became a matter of public scrutiny.14 Yet the demographic problem has become acute since the 1990s, when the fall of the communist regimes in the neighboring nations, as well as the Yugoslav crisis and war, by default defined Greece as a nation of relative prosperity and an opportunity for escape from the postcommunist predicament. Low birth rates have constantly been quoted as one of Greece’s most serious national problems, to the extent that throughout the 1990s various committees, research groups, and institutions were involved in finding a solution to the problem of the depleting Greek national body. The female body assumes the function of some kind of “social adhesive,” even when in reality woman has no social function whatsoever.15 The symbolism attached to the female body is highly sexualized and linked to her reproductive function, to the point that woman has no other meaning but the one ascribed to her body. She is the nation, her body the bearer of the nation’s rejuvenating powers, protected and sacred, but she does not belong to the nation in the way that men do.16 Her reproductive attributes always carry the potential for the contamination of the national essence by other ethnic groups, and her body must be protected in the way men defend their national borders.17 Her symbolic/sexual powers are safe only when harnessed and guarded by strict regulations. Female bodies are therefore dominated and their sexuality subdued by various repressive measures. They are rarely offered up for slaughter as combatants but are nevertheless frequently collectively victimized, for example, in extracommunal acts, especially mass rape, ideologically informed as the punitive campaign of one patriarchy upon both the biological continuation and the moral supremacy of another.18 The female body assumes the significance of a means of “communication” between one’s “own” and “enemy” patriarchies, which use it as currency for undermining each other’s positions in territorial claims and matters of racial and national definition.19 Being the main carriers of the reproductive function, female bodies act as agents of bastardization and have the power to uproot the imaginary purity that lies at the very foundation of every community-formation project. In essence, female sexuality and community building can hardly be reconciled, Community, Power, and the Body

27

or women incorporated into the structure of the male nation as equal members, precisely on the grounds of the power immanent in the female body to dissolve all and any such purist concepts.20 Considering that the patriarchal symbolic cannot afford the feminine disruption, the female body is not only abjected by the (male) subject prior to his entrance into the symbolic but is moreover buried alive and thus safely confined for eternity, in reality inaccessible and surviving only as a legend and a metaphor of the silent and obedient reproductive body of the nation. The assimilation of the female body by a phallic power structure is at the center of Elisabeth Bronfen’s work, which speaks of the preservation of the communal spirit and cultural norms over the dead body of the sacrificed woman. In Bronfen’s view virtually every patriarchal undertaking is constructed on the dead body of a woman, the sacrifice performed specifically for the sake of a community or culture as such: “Cultural norms are reconfirmed or secured, whether because the sacrifice of the virtuous, innocent woman serves a social critique and transformation or because a sacrifice of the dangerous woman re-establishes an order that was momentarily suspended due to her presence.”21 In Bronfen’s view, regardless of whether she is virtuous or dangerous, woman is sentenced to death in the process of ameliorating the social tensions and so “keeps communal violence, agitation and disorder at bay, or ends a sequence of violent events to re-found a social order.”22 Any corporeal transgression, whether that of a beautiful and virtuous body or that of a beautiful but sinful body, qualifies as social transgression from the point of identification of body with society, since the boundaries of the corporeal replicate the boundaries of the social and, therefore, the acceptable. Both transgressions are punishable by death, because they represent the breaching of body boundaries in unregulated ways, and consequently threaten the integrity of body/society from the outside.23 Bronfen concludes that female fertility is “accompanied by death and as such antithetical to cultural procreation.” It must be superseded by “true ancestral fertility,” or masculine, social, cultural fertility through which the spirit, if not the actual body, is posited as undying and eternal, the act that reestablishes the social norms threatened by the rupture caused by death.24 Bronfen’s perception is informed by the dialectic of the body as a female and the soul as a male element and reads natural death as the feminine, first death, which is therefore associated with “pollution,” “disorder,” or “separation.” Dying as a natural act acquires feminine attributes, all of which relate to death, rotting, contagion, and disease. Such a state of decay calls for the reestablishing of order, which, according to this dialectic, is unmistakably defined by masculine attributes of “second death,” civilization, and ultimately

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28 Community Power and the Body

the reunification of the communal spirit that collapsed after the first death or “separation.” The reestablishment of order that bridges this rupture caused by death, aggression, or disorder represents a second death, through which the deceased is reintegrated as part of the community. It is therefore symbolized in the act of the entombment of the sacrificial victim, the monumental and ritual burial traditionally performed by men. It is also seen as a “creative death,” defined as the continuity of the communal/national spirit “ensured through culture, heroic deeds, and qualities of the spirit.”25 Bronfen interprets such a sharp division of social duties, which underlies traditional ritual practices, as yet another instance of assigning women to deal with natural functions of the body not acceptable to male social members: “many societies assign to women the roles which involve the closest contact with the corpse and the most marked detachment from the rhythms of everyday life, while leaving men to deal with the more public aspects of funeral.”26 One aspect of the argument that remains unresolved in Bronfen’s extrapolation of the cycle of dying followed by entombment, which for the purposes of my discussion I will call monumentalization, is why the sacrificial offering must be a woman and whether the gender of the corpse makes any difference for the actual ritual performance of this ceremony.27 This view of the female body as the privileged victim in heteronomous sacrifice creates the feminine site in permanent opposition to the male and patriarchal foundation of the symbolic. It allows little or no dynamic exchange and instead reads the two in solidified antithetical relation similar to that between the Universal and Particular in Hegelian dialectics, which sees the feminine as the Particular, whose repression is the prerequisite for the existence of the Universal (community). Community, according to Hegel, “gets itself subsistence only by breaking in upon family happiness and dissolving self-consciousness into the universal, it creates itself on what it represses.”28 In this sense, it is not woman as such but the family circle that she jealously commands that stands in competition with the Universal/ community. What must be dissolved in order for the individual (male) members to join the community and enable the public sphere to function is precisely the family circle. This “negativity” in fact closely resembles the abjection of the mother that is inscribed into the process of successful entrance into the symbolic by each individual.29 Following the incorporation of family into its own structure and the obliteration of woman’s traditional sphere of influence, the Universal/community construes woman as its subversive inner opposition. Even when ultimately “repressed” by the very fact that the public sphere takes over what she perceives as her domain alone, woman continues to exist by extension and by her “eternal irony” persistently “negatively reacts Community, Power, and the Body

29

to the universal community.”30 This is our legendary immured mother who never ceases to influence the imagination of the population and who, despite being murdered for and built into the social structure, continues to exert pressure upon and cause fear in the community. She needs to be endlessly immured and killed, for she will be an eternal source of anxiety among the guardians of the law, as well as a disturbance of communal order. However, the female body is not a one-dimensional icon of absolute victimization. Despite the fact that the majority of feminist criticism tends to place women in the privileged site of victimhood, or simply to overlook them as actors in conflict, some writers who declare themselves “feminist” are reluctant to exculpate women of their responsibility, even for death and carnage in a war situation. Slavenka Drakulić, for example, refuses to objectify women in any way that would abolish their share of responsibility for the death brought by men resolving conflicts on their own. Quite the contrary, and operating within the strict legal definitions of civil society, she burdens women with the responsibility that every citizen shares in the wake of a conflict: “Perhaps it is much easier to kill if you don’t give birth. But I am reluctant to say what should follow from this: that women don’t participate, or conduct or decide about wars, because they do. Not as women, but as citizens. As citizens they contribute, support, hail, exercise orders, help and work for war—or they protest, boycott, withdraw support, lobby and work against it. This is where our responsibility lies and we cannot be excused.”31 Drakulić reminds us of the implausibility of any such discourse of absolute victimization but also notes that women, although to a much lesser degree than men, not always reluctantly take up the role of equal participants in collective murder.32 Finally, isn’t the vila from the Building of Skadar, who suspends the construction until an appropriate human sacrifice is offered to her, both female and an overseer of the entire project? In my later discussion I will be less concerned with the gender of the victim and will instead dedicate more space to the gender dynamic that informs the economy of sacrifice so profoundly connected to the creation of community, culture, and just about every civilizational construct.

Sexual Repression and Homosocial Desire And it is precisely in the sphere of gender dynamics that we should seek a better and broader meaning of the sacrificial legend. Such an interpretation is offered by Branka Arsić, who sees the female body and principle fall victim to male homosocial anxiety, which surfaces powerfully in the process of community formation.33 Arsić’s patriarchal Serbia is a nation of undersubjectivated men and virtually nonextant women who have, supposedly, all been

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built into the structure of the “pure” male-city/nation. Arsić transposes the immurement legend into the nationalist sphere and interprets it as a symbolic act of deliberate exclusion of women from the social domain, necessitated by the need to cover up for homoerotic tensions among society’s male members. Arsić delineates chauvinist impositions and brutality against women in patriarchal communities as a manifestation of a complex mechanism created for the purpose of suppressing male homoerotic desire, but also homophobic anxiety induced by the necessity of men-to-men social interactions.34 The milieu in which Arsić invokes the legend is one of defeated nationalism that retreats into itself in obsessive weeding out of traitors, homosexuals, and similar “inside enemies” of its collective being.35 Any admittance of treacherous and potentially bastardizing female sexuality would necessarily dissolve the collective’s precarious purity. The act of immurement of the loyal wife in the legend barely camouflages male homosocial anxiety. Yet this reading challenges the thesis of woman’s sacrifice at the community’s entrance into the symbolic and instead positions the sacrificed woman at the site of double subjectivation. Namely, the female victim in the Serbian legend is an already fully constituted subject: she is a woman, wife of a prince, mother of a child. She is, therefore, fully cognizant of her gender and her social and familial roles. There is nothing about her that can be interpreted as ignorance of or unresponsiveness to social interpellatory strategies and can thus leave her abandoned to the realm of the semiotic. She is murdered so that men can construct a city/nation whose exclusivity is founded on the total absence of the feminine principle. Even the (first, original) symbolic to which she owed her allegiance—family, kinship, race, and even the nation—likewise falls victim to the new undertaking: the creation of the symbolic field that rids itself of woman as a mediator of reproduction and creates space for the eternal continuation of a pure male race. This contradicts those interpretations that insist on the female victim as the symbol of untouched nature, in permanent opposition to the social or cultural. Instead, the real loss to the community lies in the fact that when the woman’s natural body dies in the foundations, what is also lost is the social woman, the wife of the king/master builder, the mother to his heir.36 Granted that Arsić’s reading was inspired by the debacle of Milošević’s resuscitated nationalist program at the turn of the past century, her analysis of the Serbian epic reveals the rather impotent imaginary of the already bankrupt ideology that Dušan Bjelić, less paradoxically than it seems at first, recognizes as the axiom of EU supranational integration: “[The wild Balkan man] uninhibitedly acts out a system of masculinity. His uninhibited homosocial bonding and homoerotic desires, effervescing in nationalism Community, Power, and the Body

31

ingrained in the institution of a nation-state, are revealed in his passionate and violent exclusion of women and minorities. He expresses with passionate physicality what Eurotechnocrats emotionlessly express in economy and law. His ethnic essence is thus a threat, and, at the same time, the first principle of European integration.”37 However, Bjelić’s denuding of the apparently uninhibited and careless (but never harmless) flaunting of the collective’s primordial masculinity neglects to emphasize that this reactionary repression of female and ethnic otherness is not simply a natural mode of behavior, whose primitivism is not acceptable for inclusion into the EU or any other privileged idiom. Inclusion is the ultimate, albeit unacknowledged, desire of this male collectivity, and violent chauvinism is also necessarily a frustrated reaction to failure of inclusion into that idiom. Thus the stigma that the female and/or minority body suffers in aggressive Balkanness is to a large extent a refraction of the latter’s own inadmissible status according to the imposed standards. Readings of the legend focusing on the background motivation for the violent removal of the female body from the social sphere bring to light a new dynamic between community and the body. They view social rules suppressing female sexuality (in particular) and repression against women in general as resulting from the need to regulate transgressive male (potential) desire for other male bodies. Sexual repression is therefore a compensatory process that assumes the form of regulative impositions on the female body (and thus its sacrifice).38 In this case the sacrifice of the female body acquires a specific ritual-mystic dimension, with woman offered up for the atonement or prevention of male sins, the reining in of male aggression, and the curbing of male desire. Ultimately, the process of edifice/community construction is driven not by desire for woman or lust for her body, but instead by desire for power and control of her body, among other things. As in Italo Calvino’s story of the City of Desire, woman is part of the narrative not as the actual object of desire, but in fact as a symbol for the goals desire sets before its male proponents. Desire emerges as the spiritus movens of this cultural-historical enterprise, but we need to better define the very nature of this desire, as it does not necessarily presuppose heterosexual yearning for a harmonious joining of the male and female elements or the striving for the ultimate liberation from all forms of repression.39 In fact, this desire proves to be the opposite on both counts: the shared dream-desire of male builders is the desire for the meeting and visionary union of men with identical power-driven creative goals, while the exclusive nature of the city they attempt to erect reveals the multiple ramifications of the sacrificial narrative that involves in the relation of subjugation a myriad of other other bodies, described equally by gender

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as by ethnic, religious, racial, or class identifiers. Camille Paglia probably had this in mind when she proposed that all civilization work is essentially the tireless forging of male identity against archetypal female sexuality.40 The undeniably creative task of the building of civilization, community, and culture tends to be viewed as an overly masculine pursuit and a result of man’s anxiety in relation to an all-powerful, archetypal female mother-wife figure. The male creative urge arises as a necessary initiation ritual that fits in the brief period of man’s freedom, between being sexually “ruled” by either his mother or his wife-lover. Paglia interprets masculine pursuits, and even aggressive male sexuality, as a natural drive of men to prove themselves and realize their potential in this short span of time between two determining female influences in their lives. Male homosexuality is therefore explained as the ultimate peak of man’s creativity and the definition of his identity in opposition to the female. Within this framework Calvino’s version of the city-construction narrative demonstrates an implicit investment of male desire for other men with pivotal significance in the community/cityconstruction process that has precedence over all other forms of social organization, including the family.

Why Is the Male Body Such a Riot? Homosocial bonding is firmly rooted in the repudiation of female polluting sexuality and an escape from the family routine. However, male comradeship and allegiance cannot be uncritically equated with homosexuality, as they refer more to the community of spirit (and frequently of arms) of male participants than to their sexual orientation and practices.41 For all its “spiritual” dimension, however, homosocial organization by no means proscribes misogyny, racism, and other forms of marginalization or exclusion of women and other sociopolitically peripheral factors. Quite the contrary, it is the very nature of isolationist communities to encourage the marginalization and exclusion of a broad range of other bodies, thus surrounding the fact of their own existence and practices with an air of mystification. The very fact of such exclusivity in turn begets paranoid anxiety related to the fear of the infiltration of elements barred from membership, as well as a sense of subversion, betrayal, and related consequences. It is only expected that the frequently homosocial format of such communities will entail homosexual anxiety and in return a feeling of being threatened by the very anxiety it creates. For this reason male homosocial organizations (religious or fascist associations, fraternities, fan clubs), or communities in which men for the lack of alternatives bond with others of the same sex (the military, prison), commonly reproduce and manifest the most violent and irrational forms Community, Power, and the Body

33

of homophobia and regularly place themselves at the forefront of violence against homosexuals. There exists an uneasy relationship between the idea of national unity and anxiety in the face of the threat that this inverted image of the male body symbolizes for the national community. Nationalist sentiments and the disproportionate presence of men in social and political life foreground the antagonistic and subversive potential of male homoeroticism. With the evolution of the nationalist idea in Europe in general, representations of male sexuality tend to be sublimated into the symbolism of morality and determination, while any previous erotic imagery of women metamorphoses into stern and dignified figures of the protectress of family and nation.42 The real woman gives in to the territorial symbol to whom men swear eternal love and allegiance, for whom they die, and whom they symbolically “marry” and pledge to defend to their deaths. The body becomes a kind of armor, a deterrent to sexual desire and life-affirming principles, and an aesthetic representation of unparalleled state repression, hysterical insistence on hygiene (racial as well as personal), and the notion of a healthy and militarily usable body. The more repressive the regime, the stronger its emphasis on procreation, while the threat of homosexuality lies precisely in its subversive dissociation from the female object, which as such puts in jeopardy the very core of societal reproduction. Male sexuality emerges as a more dangerous threat to the health of the national body than does female sexuality, which is easily subdued into a pacified and sedate symbol of motherhood. As a direct representational opposite to the anarchy implied by male pleasure in homosexual penetration and uncontrolled erotic desire, female (homo)sexuality was not criminalized even in Nazi Germany. In contrast, the male “homosexual enemy” is frequently treated as a racial one and as detrimental to national health as abortion or disease.43 Arguably, some of the most rewarding studies of this phenomenon have been done on overtly militant historical regimes, like Nazi Germany—a textbook case of a narrowly defined and isolationist communal organization, whose broad and aggressive intrusion upon individual life was oriented primarily toward banishing sensual eroticism as the very embodiment of liberation, emancipation, and genuine communication. Evolving from pre-Nazi advocacy of male bonding that elevated the ancient image of male beauty—rooted in Winckelman’s idealist and skewed interpretation of classical sculpture—to the symbol of a healthy national body, the new ideal reaches its apex in the fascist aesthetics of cold eroticism and the fetishization of sexuality. Sexual depravity (and deprivation) is consequently monumentalized in the phallic symbol of the über-repressive State.44

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The male body becomes an unlikely symbol that tickles the imagination of the modern citizen and epitomizes the qualities of the national collective, while in turn being an object of political manipulation.45 But this new symbol simultaneously becomes the victim of a sacrificial practice, so that the image of massive corporeal mutilation and murder of male bodies almost imperceptibly substitutes the vanquishing of the symbolic female body in the immurement legend. When the national body, as the narrative goes, strives for unity in the face of tendencies that jeopardize it and aim at fragmenting and weakening it, the nation can only depend on the integrity of its male component, which has arguably more significance for the alleged purity of the national being than does the uncontaminated female body. After all, the degree to which male bodies were tortured, raped, castrated, and mutilated in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s—most of which still remains unreported and unknown, unlike the better-documented mass rapes of women in the same period—more than sufficiently emphasizes the degree of importance it plays in the nationalist imagination.46 National totality is to be achieved in the face of alien elements that originate in the nation’s innermost parts (even including the interior body/mind of each individual member), as well as endless other forms of “otherness”—gender, race, class, and ethnoreligious difference representing only the most apparent aspects. Thus the “sacrifice” that each member of the (male) nation has to offer is a ritual purification of the body (individual and collective) of whatever threatens that imaginary coherence. First and foremost, each individual needs to silence the “woman within” himself, that “foreigner” who is paradoxically also the key factor in the subject’s psychological integrity and sanity.47 As internal self-cleansing is a more difficult goal to achieve, the need is easily projected onto the external and more visible gender, racial, sexual, or class subordinates who regularly pay the price of the collective’s inner fears and anxieties. Nation can thus become the “most explicit available foundation of male demands for domination.”48 Perhaps the most extreme example of this male homosocial universe, or of any however moderate expression of Blut und Boden ideology, is only mistakenly considered as the elevation of the female symbol, given the increase in public concern for the female sexual and reproductive body that such an ideological universe necessarily promotes.49 Klaus Theweleit claims that fascist males “fuck the earth” with the desire not to fuse with it, but to once and for all repudiate it.50 Unity and fusion are imagined with other similar males, but not with women. The male fascist, as Theweleit defines him, although the same is true of the typical male member of any isolationist community, makes a clear distinction between his own peers and women, ethnic and Community, Power, and the Body

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racial “enemies,” as much as between himself and particular social layers, or the “masses,” who are uniformly unfit to belong to his ideal of community. In this particularist fantasy, the individual male always feels superior to the masses but yearns to fuse with other males he perceives as his equals or betters. The nation is thus defined as “the opposite of mass, femininity, equality, sensuous pleasure, desire and revolution,” and this separation is evident even in the sanitized manner in which the male body is appropriated for nationalist territorial claims after death.51 Namely, the investment of the male body in a metaphor that circumscribes the national territory takes place via a prior decontamination from sexually charged attributes—the process that Julie Mostov designates as “desexing.” While woman embodies the territory/ community in its most fragile and vulnerable state with her live, sexual, and reproductive biological body, which is dangerous due to its “permeability to contamination” by alien groups, the male body is identified with the territory only once it is slain and buried.52 The male victim’s heroic and sanctified blood soaks the earth, which as a result acquires sacred properties to be defended by future generations (ancestral graves, the ultimate object of communal memory).

The Feminine as a Site of Collective Memory Victimized male bodies carry as much social significance as do female ones, and in my further discussion both are regarded at sites of victimization and repression. Such an approach allows for a more balanced study of the gender problematic involved in the sacrificial metaphor as it does not ignore the fact that the male body is used, abused, and sacrificed to a high degree by the operations of power structures and mechanisms of hierarchical divisions of masculinities in general, even if the scope of this abuse is not and cannot be identical to the one to which the female body is exposed. As R. W. Connell’s seminal study indicates, no patriarchal society rests on the dichotomous antagonism of “men vs. the rest,” but in fact on a very complicated structure of “competing masculinities” in constant struggle for dominance over each other.53 Neither is this complex hierarchy entirely a discursive construct, as poststructuralism would have it, but is on the contrary profoundly based on the natural behavior of the primeval horde. Ideological discourse and repressive social mechanisms, however, are persuasive modern-day deterrents to any challenges to this hierarchical order. Dubravka Žarkov elaborates: “Competing forms of masculinities exist within the same culture, [the result being] that every society has a plurality of socially unequal masculinities, and that only some of these—associated with the most powerful social groups—will assume the position of dominance or hegemony, while

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the others will be marginalized or subjugated. Hegemonic masculinities are supported by powerful social institutions and ideologies, the authority of which rests on violence as well as on identities internalized through culture.”54 This is the reason why I choose to define the body of sacrifice as feminine in place of always and necessarily “female.” I borrow this concept from Sue Vice, who links the concept of the feminine to the state of perceived or objective social marginality rather than gender alterity, although the attributes she associates it with derive from the peripheral position generally ascribed to and analyzed in relation to the female gender.55 Every disenfranchised body can find itself in the site of the feminine and in the position of an appropriate sacrificial victim: “Any socially marginalized (but symbolically central) group may find itself linked to the feminine. . . . The feminine is what is marginal to the symbolic realm, a position currently occupied by women, among others.”56 Women are, therefore, not the only carriers of the symbolical meaning, albeit of peripheral social significance, as the site of the feminine incorporates borderline social identities of race, religion, class, or ethnicity, as much as it is already invested with gender attributes. Such a definition of “marginal” resounds with Gayatri Spivak’s now often quoted proposition of the “subaltern” (that cannot speak), through which Spivak introduces class and gender issues into the arena of postcolonial politics, predominantly interested in a racial problematic. Spivak thus treats the (postcolonial) female subject as the worst affected by the process and effects of Western (neo)imperialism. My argument invites a comparable introduction of the issues of class, ethnicity, or race, to name a few, into a discussion that is already strongly gender oriented. The many female and male bodies sacrificed in the texts I discuss in this volume find themselves in the position that is, in postcolonial theory, for example, permanently occupied by the racial, social, or class other. Discrimination against women merges with other forms of bias—racial, social, political—and becomes an inseparable part of the overall hierarchy of injustice. All these diverse categories of subjugation are treated as feminine, as the heterogenous/other to the masculinized universe of power struggle that subjugates and sacrifices difference. The sacrificial victim is therefore not a strictly gender-defined one, but rather falls into a broader description of a socially marginalized or disenfranchised individual or group. Ultimately, both sexes are victims of heteronormative repression, but women are doubly repressed: both by general social rules that affect men as well as women and by an additional code of behavior directed solely at restricting women’s rights (and sexuality). Such a definition tentatively corresponds to some aspects of Agamben’s Community, Power, and the Body

37

homo sacer, of the life that can be destroyed with impunity and that outside of its physical existence (zoē, or “bare life”) signifies absolutely nothing: it is “life that cannot be sacrificed, yet may be killed.”57 The homo sacer/feminine occupies a precarious position with respect to the mainstream community, outside of rules applicable to the majority, and has no authority over the ways in which the community disposes of their bodies. In a community in crisis— either a nascent community or one that feels itself to be under attack and musters its defensive mechanisms by projecting the threat onto an individual or an entire social group—the life of the homo sacer becomes identified with the ambiguous sacredness that Agamben takes as the starting position of his discussion, which falls outside the scope of homicide penalized by the legal code, although it can be destroyed by any member of the majority population.58 What is at stake for the recognized homo sacer in this case is their “bare life” (zoē), which is completely divested of any connection with the human persona inhabiting it. The homo sacer thus defined is a victim of the social contract between the majority group (socialized bodies) and the system of repression in Althusserian terms, which automatically transfers the responsibility for such victimization to each and every socialized individual/body. Those who at the point of communal crisis find themselves on the side of full participants in the social contract, however, whom we regularly refer to as the “majority,” are thus the socialized majority of complicit bodies, who are simultaneously the collective homines sacri, in the sense that the sovereign/ state can at any time intervene, invoking its legal authority over them, and conscript them to participate in a war, for example. But paradoxically, this same majority can exercise power over the disposition of the bare life of the designated heteronomous or (sacrificial) individual/group. Foucault bases his notion of the body’s acquiescence to its own sacrifice precisely on this last category of the subject’s willing participation in ideological projects. He questions whether, in the interaction between the body and the system of authority, the system can impose absolute control over the life of the subject devoid of agency. He suggests that the “investment of the body” by the forces of politics and history is such that, if not exactly allowing much maneuvering space to the individual/body, the interaction is not a clear case of the exertion of authority by an all-powerful state or group (the sovereign) over a victimized body. The “investment” that Foucault talks about requires a level of the body’s willing responsiveness and self-subjection to authority in order for this relationship to even be possible: [This] power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege,” acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its



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strategic positions—an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those “who do not have it”; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them. . . . This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontiers between classes.59

It takes a certain level of the body’s acquiescence for the act of manipulation to take place. Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between power (sovereign state) and subjects thus implies a certain responsibility for the results of both the subjects’ action and their inaction. Yet this radical claim is considerably softened when psychological attachment to one’s subjection is taken into account, the dependence rooted in existential fears or, as Foucault says, in one’s “soul.”60 Moreover, the relationship that Foucault has in mind is accurate if considered within the boundaries of the interaction between the authority and those citizens who partake of the social contract and who are therefore the “majority.” It becomes more problematic to suppose that it can relate to those who at any given time find themselves on the other side of the social contract and are targeted for elimination. It is inconceivable that victims would cooperate with the perpetrator in their own extermination. However, the organization of the Sonderkommando in the Nazi extermination camps and the willing participation in the liquidation of Jewish prisoners by other Jewish prisoners (who would likewise be eliminated themselves in due time) represent precisely such remarkable achievements on the part of the system of authority. In making the victims responsible for and the very organizers of their own elimination, the survivors ashamed and guilty of their survival, the system reaches the ultimate in bureaucratic management of unwanted bodies. This paradox of a seemingly consensual affair between the body and authority needs to be taken into account in any discussion of the idea of freedom and the apparent impossibility of its achievement due to external factors of oppression. Taken to the extreme, it is the fear of what lies beyond the limits of repression that effectively thwarts the desire to neutralize it, rather than the existence of an invincible authority that perpetuates itself through insuperable control. The body’s intimate reaction to this fear is a projection of its own unfreedom onto the repressive heteronomous big Other whose authority allegedly impedes the achievement of the ultimate goal and to which the sacrifice is ritually dedicated. Therefore, the reason for the body’s complacent collusion with the elitist (sovereign) project and its refusal of Community, Power, and the Body

39

open confrontation with the repressive apparatus is not the impossibility of achieving the desired goal (of liberation). Quite the opposite; the reason lies in the absence of that very desire for liberation and the fear of what comes next, when the seat of authority is usurped or when it is proven beyond doubt that such an external deterrent to freedom never really existed. This fear is conveniently projected onto those disenfranchised minorities who in reality lack any tangible sway over the social contract; they are, for all intents and purposes, not even part of that social contract, which makes them ideal targets in any situation of social crisis—precisely the time when the majority of complicit bodies use the vulnerability of those without influence to turn against them. For desire is always also the desire of another with which it exists in an unceasing battle of imposition and submission. The sacrificial cycle thus involves the destruction of desire projected onto the bod(ies) of difference (worthless yet possessed by antagonistic desire) for the ostensible purpose of removing the impediment that the big Other represents for the achievement of that very desire, always linked to conflict and domination.61

Sacrifice, Desire, and Capitalism The individual and community always exist in opposition to each other as mutually exclusive subjectivities. Community in its imaginary homogenized unity does not solely require the sacrifice of the unintegrated and heterogeneous element, the unassimilated body we have thus far seen occupying the position of the feminine although not necessarily female body—be it a female, disabled, or gay body or an embodiment of racial, social, or ethnoreligious difference. Not only is it capable of activating mechanisms that culminate in the annihilation of both itself and the other, but its very existence depends on those mechanisms. Roberto Esposito theorizes about sacrifice as the bare essence of modern community that can be extended only if the mutual ties between its members (men) have been torn. And since these ties, the cum in Esposito’s account, are annihilated, the men-participants themselves must be sacrificed as well. The “life [of the individual, his subjectivity] is sacrificed to the preservation of life [the existence of community].”62 Bataille has likewise extensively written about the sacrifice of an (other) individual as a mechanism through which community is revealed (to others who are not yet sacrificed). The sense of belonging, of community with others, is created by this act of sacrifice. Bataille defines the excessive singularity of being, or individuality itself, as motivated to destruction by the presence of multiple other singularities and as necessarily leading to the collapse of the community ideal. Competing singularities’ destructive passions result in the “unworking” of community, which is what Bataille defines as the sacred.

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His sacred singularity is what we have thus far encountered as individual desire, always in conflict with the passions or desires of others and prone to destruction. Bataille’s concept of the sacred is thus dialectically opposed to Agamben’s, in the sense that while Agamben’s homo sacer is a life marked for annihilation, in Bataille the sacred is the force of destruction itself. What the two have in common is a potential for the subversion of communal order. Finally, for Jean-Luc Nancy the very existence of the individual is a reminder of the failure of community, of the process of the loss of community. The individual exists because community no longer does.63 Nancy’s deploring of individuality standing victorious over communal forces would seem in stark opposition to the rest, were it not for the fact that Nancy is talking of the loss of the community ideal, while the others discuss the incorporation of the individual into the structure of the “really existing community.” Bataille is concerned with more than one type of sacrifice in his work, one type concentrated around the sacrifice of an individual, designed so that others will experience death (of an other) as a prerequisite for the creation of community, and the other culminating in the unproductive expenditure of waste. While the former to a certain extent correlates to the idea of sacrifice I have already discussed, the latter is of more interest at this point as it is as much an ideological as an economic principle. Bataille’s concept of “restricted economy” is based on “waste, sacrifice, expenditure, transgression, community, and death” and stands in stark opposition to the bourgeois form of economy that leans toward the accumulation of wealth and stability.64 Excessive expenditure of waste has for centuries characterized human societies whose overproduction of commodities, nevertheless determined by a limited growth potential, has no other apparent goal but senseless destruction of both commodities and human lives alike. The cycle of hyper-production almost inevitably ends in periods of political and economic instability and in war as the climax of excessive consumption.65 I believe that this claim justifies a lengthy quotation: For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion. These excesses of life force, which locally block the poorest economies, are in fact the most dangerous factors of ruination. Hence relieving the blockage was always, if only in the darkest region of consciousness, the object of a feverish pursuit. Ancient societies found relief in festivals; some erected admirable monuments that had no useful purpose; we use

Community, Power, and the Body

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the excess to multiply “services” that make life smoother, and we are led to reabsorb part of it by increasing leisure time. But these diversions have always been inadequate: Their existence in excess nevertheless (in certain respects) has perpetually doomed multitudes of human beings and great quantities of useful goods to the destruction of wars. In our time, the relative importance of armed conflicts has even increased; it has taken on the disastrous proportions of which we are aware.66

What Bataille suggests here is not limited to efficiently dealing with difference and socially undesired elements but introduces a new dimension of class and class-related power over the means of production and their distribution that has little if anything to do with the paradox of sacrifice as a mechanism of the preservation of life. Capitalism is not the first model of economic organization to utilize the concept of surplus, but it is, however, the apex of the trajectory of hyper-production and under the constant urge to expand and produce an even greater excess of commodities—which in turn require an ever-greater pace of excess expulsion. It is equally invested in the hyperproduction of desire (to consume) as the main condition of its own sustenance as it is in the overproduction of goods purportedly essential for the satisfaction of such a projected demand.67 The Nazi attempt at the “final solution” of the extermination of social pathogens—and besides Jews, their immunization of the Aryan genos was equally focused on the destruction of other racially heterogeneous elements and also on disabled and disordered Aryan bodies that were seen as irredeemable for the healthy German race— is thus the ultimate symptom of capitalist hyper-production-determined expulsion of excess but also of its cold and hysterically clean management of the economy of sacrifice.68 Through reinstating the figure of the authoritative leader, fascism projects the imbalance inherent in capitalism to an external factor, isolating it for destruction in the crusade of restoring balance to society and preserving the integrity of the social body. The cycle that starts with the production of the rhetoric of desire and hyper-production of commodities and closes with the expulsion of excess gains its ultimate meaning in genocidal acts reaching their most horrific emanations when crossbred with capitalist modes of production. In this context desire is projected onto the excessive other, who allegedly threatens the general community by ownership of or control over vital aspects of the community’s existence (products of its labor, financial means, the good life, safety, jobs, women, etc.) and who is stigmatized as the repository of accumulated social problems (minorities, homosexuals, immigrants). Žižek characteristically interprets this as the “ideological displacement” of enjoyment,

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the process through which the subject (community) in fact despises its own enjoyment (and the perhaps morally adverse excesses generated as a result) but only recognizes the excesses as such when they are projected onto the other, who then becomes the embodiment of the excess that must be sacrificed for a new period of stability in the community.69 Desire at the same time lies in the foundations of community building, manifested in the Thing to which only initiated members are privy and that is consequently out of the reach of the other. It is of little import, therefore, whether the collective hates its own “inner Jew,” the “homosexual within,” the “nomadic Gypsy,” or the “dirty immigrant” who has infiltrated its ranks and destroys its imaginary purity and the aesthetics of its order. A careful consideration of the sacrificial economy enables us to reinterpret some of the growing problems in the postcommunist world that only fairly recently reconverted to capitalism. Nationalist hysteria and other forms of chauvinism in these societies are generated not merely through the often-mentioned manipulation of ethnic nationalist tensions by old communist cliques, but precisely by the capitalist imperative to grow and expand into new territories with consumerist potential. Economic insecurity, loss of income, and unemployment, all regular consequences of the implementation of capitalist economic practices in postsocialist societies, create fertile ground for the mushrooming of ethnoreligious identitarian demagoguery and manipulation of disillusioned masses unable to hold their ground in the cataclysmic social transformation that wiped out the modicum of security offered by the dismantled social state. Simultaneously, new-old forms of domination reemerge that are characteristic of more primitive forms of capitalism and are axiomatically imposed as a logical development in devastated postcommunist economies, forever in “transition” to a stage they will most likely never achieve. Small wonder that postcommunist societies as a rule are plagued by accumulated problems in virtually every sector of social organization. In this light the tragedy of the Yugoslav dissolution wars cannot be read solely as a relapse into barbarism but must also be interpreted as a consequence of encroaching capitalist relations and the abrogation of socialist safety nets, regardless of whether these previously existed solely as legislative possibilities or as realities of daily life. War or revolution in this case represents the ultimate and most extreme model of the resolution not only of production overflow within a limited market (unsurprisingly, the idea of distributing the surplus to those in need never emerges as a solution to this economic problem) but also of communal tensions at times of total moral collapse, during which society rids itself of its “excessive value,” manifested in the massive destruction of goods and Community, Power, and the Body

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material structures or, finally, in the elimination of unwanted elements from within the rehomogenized religious/national body. Foucault recognizes massive destruction of life as “vital” in the “name of necessity” for the sustenance of whole societies, as slaughters are performed “on behalf of the existence of everyone.”70 Society utilizes this radical intervention with the goal of reducing the waste of alien bodies and thus assuring the prolonged healthy existence of its own communal spirit (religious or ethnic, no difference), but by its employment it also gets rid of its own excess—the surplus of commodities and population alike (who necessarily die as victims or even as perpetrators of aggression against the external or internal other)—and in this way enables a subsequent period of rapid economic growth and relative political stability.71 Human life becomes divested of all content and meaning, its destruction facilitated by sanitized bureaucratic jargon. Meanwhile, the sacrificial economy that so closely guides the community/nation is, in the words of Carolyn Marvin, the “collective group taboo,” the secret knowledge they all share “that society depends on the death of its own members at the hands of the group.” 72 Sacrifice assumes the form of a meaningful transaction in which lives are heroically exchanged for the “defense” of “freedom,” “country,” “democracy,” and similar abstract concepts whose validity becomes axiomatic since it was paid for in blood.73 Although the model of the ultimate destruction of excess that Bataille proposes is intended as a tool for ending the capitalist economy, so far such expunging of surplus has been used precisely by the bourgeoisie and has unsurprisingly only made it possible for it to further extend its reach, imposing capitalism as the solution to dictatorships and sectarianism alike. Bataille realized the ever-increasing importance of warfare for capitalism, but not even he could predict the orgy of the destruction of excessive human bodies, the devastation of natural and economic resources, and the latest warfare technologies that were to be unleashed in the contemporary world, all in the supremely ironic “humanitarian” removal of dictatorial and rogue regimes around the globe. Destabilizing such a force that is no longer merely a social class could perhaps only be achieved by the agent that Bataille thought capable of this radical action. In his account that force is the lumpenproletariat, the rabble that is historically manipulated in acts of collective sacrifice (both of themselves and of their opponents) for the protection of bourgeois elitist power, which regularly operates under various guises of the defense of one abstract concept or another. Contrary to Marxist predictions that proletarian rule would supersede that of the bourgeoisie, in the Bataillan universe a successful sacrifice of the capitalist elite does not guarantee an automatic redemption of the debased lumpenproletariat. Paradoxically, the

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unleashing of this destructive orgy will only lead to the proletariat’s reclamation of their sacrificial loss and their total self-loss. At the ultimate end of capitalism, for Bataille at least, lies not the overturning of social paradigms, but ultimate and unselective annihilation. A question arises of the accuracy of such predictions in the current trend of the rise of global right-wing politics and the return of antiquated lethal capitalist practices that not only do not lead toward the eradication of lumpenproletariat but, with the increasing impoverishment of working classes, swell its numbers. Moreover, due to the defeat of socialist ideas and leftist politics that proved inadequate to social challenges, this rapidly growing impoverished class has nowadays more than ever become susceptible to chauvinist and fascizoid ideologies and in fact their most fearsome proponent. The ultimate effect of any theoretical lumpen revolution in the Bataillan sense could, therefore, result in total annihilation and the class’s self-sacrifice, not as a consequence of its targeting of the bourgeois elite, but because of the extremism of the ideologies it adheres to and the methods it utilizes as its weapon. In conclusion, the sacrificial logic of the social system is created and contributed to in many little or big ways, either by active propagation and support or by rather complacent tolerance and aversion to assuming an active role in its alteration. Foucault’s logic of complicit bodies in this respect makes much more sense, while simultaneously incorporating each and every social participant, even the passive bystander who generally leaves society-changing work to others. Foucault’s position is confirmed by many of the authors whose work will be the subject of my discussion on the pages that follow—authors who, in effect, demand the fully assumed and unmitigated responsibility of every social subject for every act of violence, verbal, administrative, or physical, that is perpetuated in their name against any disenfranchised and/or stigmatized body. This request, naturally, applies to those who are actually free, allowed, accounted for, and politically and administratively able to participate in the social contract—and these always exist in large enough numbers to be capable of effectuating change. The only thing that may be lacking, therefore, is the political consciousness and will to enact that change. And that, in return, fits the description of not only the complicit passive observer but also a potential sacrifice.

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Chapter 2 A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

The words “Greece,” “mission,” and “duty” are meaningless. But it is beautiful to sacrifice ourselves, wilfully, for these nothings. I believe that there is no religion more in accord with man’s deepest hardihood than the cultivation of purposeless heroism.

—Nikos Kazantzakis, quoted in Peter Bien, Politics of the Spirit

The fact that the legend of immurement survives in many different forms and continues to be recognized as a cultural topos in the Balkans perhaps points to a conflicting dynamic of the region as a historically traumatized space and of its populations as a colorful, if occasionally explosive mix. The sacrificial myth itself, however, is frequently employed as a figure of speech in the self-description of ethnoreligious communities throughout the region, as well as depictions of the region by outside observers. During the Yugoslav wars of secession and succession in the 1990s, the period that many tendentiously referred to as “the Balkan wars,” the sacrificial aspect of the legend of immurement was resurrected and placed under the critical microscope of sociologists, cultural theorists, and amateurs alike. Reminiscent of the horror that Goethe expressed upon reading the Building of Skadar a couple of centuries ago, deeming the immurement motif utterly barbaric, the legend was once again scrutinized as “evidence” of inherent murderous inclinations of the Balkan populations that are inscribed in the deepest recesses of their culture.1 It seems that even some of the better attempts at cultural analysis produced in the climate of the Yugoslav tragedy could do little but perpetuate

46

the myth about the myth of the Balkans. However, one of the most suggestive and obvious aspects of the legend’s sacrificial motif that somehow escaped analysis lies in its dual meaning. Some recognize in it “an action of ambivalent semantics: on the one hand, it is the equivalent of separation; on the other, of integration, creation of something new—cosmos, family.”2 Critical engagement with it, however, tends to incline toward either its constructive or its destructive aspect, with rare attempts to reconcile them. Due to this ambiguity in semantics the legend opens interpretations that underline its destructive context but never abandon the equally important, if not more compelling, symbolism of death (of the human body) as a necessary prerequisite to the process of creation of something new—be it a new cosmogony, family, community, or ultimately the authority of the big Other itself.3 In the second half of the twentieth century the immurement legend reappears in historical and nation-inspired literary narratives written by some of the region’s most well-known authors. Such are, for example, the so-called bridge novels by Ivo Andrić and Ismail Kadare, as well as a relatively recent novel written by Aris Fakinos and published posthumously in 1998. A significant departure from the legendary narrative in these new texts lies in the type of the edifice in whose foundations the body expires, which is now fixed to a bridge. Given the variety of architectural structures in the many Balkan versions of the legend, it is interesting to analyze the process through which the bridge became the one edifice that continues to inspire the imagination of Balkan writers even today and, moreover, how it became a popular metaphor for the entire geopolitical region. The evolution of the edifice follows a trajectory from concrete material object to symbol, as Olga Augustinos states: “the bridge itself crossed the temporal frontier from epic time of foundational origins, now immobilized in legend, to historical processual time of crossings and passages, of shifting frontiers and transformed identities.”4 The bridge as a symbol carries a multitude of connotations that have gained currency in recent cultural, sociological, and even political discourse: it is both a very ancient and a very modern category that incorporates ancient bridges and modern technological marvels; a liminal construct spanning worlds, meanings, and historical periods; a metaphor for the fragility of the notion of national identity; a synonym for the equally indefinable geopolitical region of the Balkans—and the list is not exhausted. A bridge is primarily a distinctive crossing point, connecting or dividing the two banks/entities between which it is positioned; like the body immured within it, who is neither a stranger nor a fully integrated community member and therefore the most likely victim for the purpose, the bridge is a liminal edifice, fixed in a position of nonbelonging and in-betweenness in geographical or spatial A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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terms, a construct defying definition. In contrast to the more phallic-shaped and self-contained forms of city towers or church spires, characteristic of some versions of the legend, the very spatial layout of the bridge suggests an invitation to communication, outreach, and connection. It spans differences rather than defining them. This is probably the reason the bridge is sometimes perceived as a more “feminine” element, inclusive and dialogic, as opposed to the exclusionist, unilateral, and monologic symbolism of other structures. We can only wish that the outreaching and potentially liberating expansion of bridge architectonics should prevail in reality, as it does in myth, over the isolationist defensiveness of bulwarks and towers. These are precisely the qualities, or the lack thereof, by which the whole of the Balkans are described considering their geographical space, their political and historical position, but most of all their population. In fact, most writing on the Balkans—especially the material produced during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, which sought to satisfy the demand for instant explanations of the tragedy that defined the region as a site of mythologized resentments and epic violence—insists on heterogeneity and a multicultural legacy as a source of their historical strife.5 Instead of attenuating differences, the Balkan mosaic of “hyphenated” identities and mixed cultural values is recreated as a cause of further and deeper divisions that only reveals their glaring disproportion. In that respect the Balkans correspond to Martin Heidegger’s definition of the bridge: “[the bridge] does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across each other. One side is set off across the other by the bridge. . . . But the bridge, if it is a true bridge, is never first of all a mere bridge and then afterward a symbol.” 6 Needless to say, such a view of the bridge departs from more common perceptions, so it will become even more critical in my further discussion of the novels that utilize the bridge metaphor as their central narrative locus. There are, however, two ideas in Heidegger’s definition of the bridge that may be applicable to the Balkans. The first is the notion of the bridge acting not as a connecting point, but, in fact, as a structure that sets two oppositions further apart. The banks emerge in opposition to one another only when a bridge is placed between them. Would the banks seem more in harmony with each other and would the gap look less abysmal and insurmountable without the bridge? A natural chasm probably seems less frightening if observed from the top of one of the banks than from the middle point on the bridge that supposedly makes passage easier. If we try to push the metaphor of the bridge further and apply this definition to the Balkans, the idea does not seem immediately plausible. It does seem unusual that a territory acting as

48 A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

a “bridge” between two supposedly antagonistic and opposing civilizations, making the transition between them easier and less abrupt in cultural terms, should be considered an obstacle without which the two alleged opponents would interact with less friction. However, the problem lies in the concept of the Balkans as a “buffer zone” between the East and the West, in which demographic, cultural, and religious differences have accumulated to the extent that they represent a focal point of a possible explosion rather than a zone of dilution of oppositions. The other point Heidegger makes above is that a bridge is never only a bridge but always primarily a symbol, which stresses the primacy of a symbol over its usefulness as a material object and explicates the host of meanings ascribed to an object and the connotations these meanings acquire in the national imagination. The cultural traditions of the Balkan peoples arguably boast some of the richest bridge symbolism. Not only is the bridge symbol found in folk ballads and traditional songs, and in the many writings of authors from the region, but the metaphor has also been thoroughly and uncritically interiorized by the various populations of the Balkans. These tend to perceive themselves as an indispensable structure, sometimes a bridge, at other times a wall-like barrier, connecting and/or keeping apart at one time the “Orthodox East” from the “Catholic-Lutheran West,” at another “Christian Europe” from the “Muslim East.” Such interiorizations of the metaphor and identifications with the indefinable position assigned to territory lead to the self-liminalization and, ultimately, self-marginalization of different ethnic or religious communities. It can also foreshadow very real mutual confrontations because virtually all of these small communities think of themselves as a “bastion” or as the “ultimate limit” of this or that imaginary entity, behind which commence endless sprawls of something “else” that is distinctly alien to their own and to the nature of the entity they allegedly “protect” as a genuine human shield. This phenomenon becomes especially transparent in times of crisis and helps explain the ease with which certain strata of the population were mobilized for the criminal enterprises of local ethnic elites during the 1990s wars under various pretexts of “protecting (real) Christianity,” being “the last bastion of Europe,” “standing as a bulwark” in defense of “true European (Christian) values,” and so on. However, this kind of positive identification (and concurrent willing self-sacrifice for the benefit of an abstract idea) with defensive, defining, and exclusionary concepts stands in permanent conflict with the many notions of the bridge that suggest cohabitation, mobility, and exchange. The ideology guiding both the targeting of bridges by warring factions throughout the Yugoslav wars and, even more so, their obsessive destruction by NATO in the A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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1999 bombardment of Serbia assumes its proper meaning only in this light: it was directed at the interruption of communication and the enforcement of divisions where before there did not exist visible physical boundaries.7

Sacrifice as Corporeal Memory An early work by Nikos Kazantzakis, which to this day remains untranslated and unknown to the general public, adopts this notion of the bridge as a metaphorical as well as a material point of crossing and connection. Kazantzakis was one of the intellectuals who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, firmly envisioned the future of the Greek nation in modern Europe, rather than in slavish adoration of its heroic past, a syndrome of succession between the classical Greek legacy and the modern nation-state that Stathis Gourgouris terms the “phantasm of continuity.”8 This was the time when the Greek nation as we know it today was only being molded, with all the interrogations of its ethnic identity that arose in the wake of the centuries-long Ottoman colonization. Additionally, the new nationalist dream of resurrecting some anachronistic classical/Byzantine Greek state was shaken from its foundations, especially following the country’s 1897 defeat by Turkey. Kazantzakis, at the time a ferocious nationalist, shaped his beliefs on calls to Greeks to abandon the adoration of the past and to turn instead to modernization as the only way to revitalize their legacy in a constructive manner. This new ideal of modernizing national institutions on the European model envisions the annihilation of antiquated models of thinking, beliefs, and everything that signals backwardness and is by definition a direct antithesis of Western influence. But this ideal also stands in precarious balance with the desire to preserve what every nationalist regards as the nation’s unique and inalienably authentic quality, whose locus is precisely in the social strata that the modernist is trying to emancipate, if not completely eradicate. Peter Bien credits the influence on Kazantzakis of better-known Greek poets of the time who “advocated an arrogant Nietzschean neoromanticism that despised the slavish herd and elevated above these rayahs the immoral, iconoclastic will of the sublimely egotistic individuals, claiming that such egotism was paradoxically an altruistic force for social and nationalistic advance.”9 Kazantzakis employs the metaphor of the bridge with the intention of closing the disputed fissure between the nation’s classical past and its modern future. His play Ο protomastoras (The Master Builder), written for a drama contest in 1909, considerably modifies the symbolism of the female sacrifice and emphasizes the heroic efforts that the nation will have to make on its road to modernity.10 In this early play, which derives its subject from

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the immurement legend but is modeled on classical Greek tragedy, the building efforts of the master mason are subverted just as they are in the old ballad. The main obstacle to the creation of his masterpiece, however, stems not from an external force, but from within himself. His ambitions are inhibited and creative energies wasted by his unsublimated passion for a woman, which prevents him from fully dedicating himself to his work. Authors who have discussed this motif in the legend through mythical-ritual and Christian terms compare it to the burning ambition that makes men sacrifice what is dearest to them, in the way that Agamemnon decides to offer his daughter for his war campaign.11 Simultaneously, their ambition is also the site of hubris in a tragedy that involves both themselves and their beloveds. Yet the victim who dies in any version of the legend we have explored thus far is never the person “guilty” of the sin of ambition and pride but is instead an innocent one who is also the purest and worthiest to be offered as redemption, for the exculpation of another. Thus in the Serbian variant the blame lies with King Vukašin, who is not only overly ambitious but also sly and unworthy of his word. The woman who dies for his enterprise is the innocent wife of the only honorable one of the three royal brothers. Similarly, in all the other discussed versions, the master builder prides himself on his skill in constructing an edifice incomparable to anything known, and the one who dies is usually his unsuspecting wife. Kazantzakis’s Master Builder is a man of the new age, guided by the Nietzschean spirit of individualism, who refuses to surrender to collectivism and traditional superstitions. He is a character distinctly resembling Oedipus in his scorn of Fate and God, as well as in the trust he has in human capacities—and who ends up humbled and defeated by the very forces whose existence he denied. His exaggerated belief in the power of the human mind, his contempt for the villagers’ lack of initiative and their slavish obedience to the village lord, and his passion for a woman make up his tragic error and will be instrumental in teaching him humility. The clash of modernity with tradition is visible at all levels and makes the villagers suspicious of the Master Builder’s new bridge, which has collapsed three times, taking people’s lives with it. They warn him that his blasphemy and disrespect of Fate will not go unpunished: “Proud youth, nobody has upset the laws of God without danger.” It seems that the tug-of-war between this modern individual, who believes in his own and human abilities in general, and the traditionalists, who complacently follow well-trodden paths, cannot be resolved, since both sides ardently defend their positions. Naming the Master Builder as the reason for their many grievances and their suffering during the construction, the villagers plot to sacrifice him to the river, appease Fate, and return to the A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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untroubled existence that preceded his arrival: “Black be the hour when his foot landed on our village. . . . We’ll hang a stone round his neck. . . . And we’ll hurl him like a piece of meat into the hungry and roaring mouth of Old Man River.” The solution to the problem of solidifying the shaky bridge and ensuring it never collapses again comes from “the oracle-like Mother, the whitehaired Mother, the holy woman of the village, who lives in a cave by the river—like a ghost,” who informs the Master Builder that he will not be able to finish his work until his “hands are freed for absolute attention to his great mission—[and] he is willing to renounce his personal happiness.”12 In this episode, much like the one in which blind Tiresias suggests to Oedipus that he is responsible for the suffering of the city of Thebes, the Mother cryptically reveals that the Master Builder himself is ruining the bridge: “The Master Builder! That’s who’s to blame! He wrecks the bridge!” “Ο xanthos leventis,” the Great Blond Man, as the Master Builder calls himself, invoking the Nietzschean ideal of the Übermensch, scorns the superstitious beliefs of the rayah, the common people, and insists on the supremacy of enlightened Apollonian rationality over sentimental collectivism. However, traditional deities still command respect, and after witnessing yet another part of his bridge collapse into the river, the Master Builder demands that his lover show courage and, in line with the spirit of the time, which requires personal sacrifice for higher goals, let herself be immured into the foundations of the bridge. Relieved from a direct threat to their own lives, the entire village now expects and presses for the sacrifice of the young woman: “Joy to him who for the whole nation dies.” The sacrifice is required of the village lord as well, as it is his daughter who is to die in the bridge foundations. The woman, Smaragda, bravely enters the foundations and slowly expires as the builders surround her with iron and asbestos: “Iron I will make my heart, iron will become the bridge.” Once the masterpiece is completed, and the construction of the bridge celebrated by the people, the Master Builder leaves the village, deeming his work finished at that place. The structure that is supposed to connect the opposite banks but instead keeps disintegrating into the chasm is a metaphor for the situation in which the Greek nation found itself at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Master Builder’s passion for the beautiful woman emblematizes the Greeks’ passion for their rehabilitated past, the past they had forgotten and hardly considered theirs before European Romanticism reinvented it for them, but that, once reconquered, seemed too precious to be given up. The construction of the historical continuum, the bridge, is complete once the nation gives up its servile relationship to the past and makes it the foundation of

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its future. The building enterprise calls for a determined individual, a young stalwart who imposes himself by sheer willpower and who is the first to sever his own ties to his beloved without much sentimental reminiscing. Thus, the bridge itself stands as not only a timeline between the classical heritage and modernity but also a link connecting Greece to progressive Europe, to its Europeanness that was suspended five centuries earlier. Structurally, Kazantzakis’s play is as much an experiment in form as it is bold in content.13 Refusing to submit to the pitfalls of idealized representations of the Greek reality popular at the time, but instead himself building a link between traditional dramatic forms and modernist expression, Kazantzakis wrote a play whose form incorporated both the classical theatrical tradition and folkloric elements. The play challenged its audience with daring modern ideas that were difficult to digest at the time it was written and through which Kazantzakis warned the Greeks that without a clear vision of an expanded future, they would not be able to survive as a nation. Kazantzakis, who was at the time under the sway of Nietzschean philosophy, literally transferred the thinker’s concept of Opferstruktur—sacrificial structure—to his play. For Nietzsche sacrifice is a link between the production of collective cultural memory and the body as the site of conflict between social forces and human instincts, drives, and desires.14 Rituals, laws, initiations, and other painful investments of the individual with the sense of belonging to the collectivity as the only strategy of survival are only vivid metaphors for the violent inscription that communal forces stamp on the body of each community member. Vivid scars and wounds on the body (individual or collective) are thus the best mnemonic devices against the human tendency to forget pain and past offenses, as well as a barrier that prevents their reoccurrence. And the sacrifice of the young woman serves exactly such a mnemonic function. Smaragda, as the epitome of a modern woman, understands the significance of the social project that necessitates her death and agrees to sacrifice herself. None of the games used to coax her more ancient predecessor into the womb-tomb of the patriarchal construct are needed any longer, as she willingly steps into the foundation and submits her body to history. Kazantzakis’s play thus becomes the final occurrence of woman’s immuration at the bridge that Balkan literature is to record. On the other hand, the Master Builder is responsible for the destruction of a more primeval bond between himself and Smaragda, of their love relationship, whose annihilation he deems necessary for the purpose of finalizing his socially significant project. In the eyes of the community the Master Builder’s responsibility for the woman’s death is sublimated into his new role of national hero, because the sacrifice (not of self, but of the female other) A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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is necessitated by the greater common good. By murdering the woman, the Master Builder also establishes himself as a free subject, as this act also precludes the formation of family ties.15 His participation in the Universal/ symbolic/communal is predicated on the abolition of his more primary attachments to the female, whether mother or wife.16 Yet if we read the sacrifice of a beloved “object” as the man’s destruction of what he loves the most, more than himself even, we could speculate that he prefers to be the agent of Smaragda’s death rather than watch others kill her. Being the lover of a wandering stranger, Smaragda was already destined for sacrifice: either she dies in the bridge, or she gets married off to a man she does not love. The Master Builder loses her either way and is free to continue his civilizing mission elsewhere. In many ways the disappearance of the symbolic female body from the sacrificial site is contrary to its appropriation by the politics of male nationalist desire. In this scenario, reenacted through the duration of the patriarchal history of nation/community construction, the female body has had a very distinctive function in the political imaginary. It is the ultimate site of male nationalist desire, employed for mapping and personifying the territory, which is frequently conflated with female attributes. It serves a multiplicity of political purposes in its transformation from the body of the founding “mother of the nation” to the “daughter of the nation” at moments of external threats. The period of modernity in Europe and the Balkans is likewise the period of fervent nationalism, and it is logical to assume that the female body should only gain in significance in the nationalist project. Despite this fact, in twentieth-century narratives focused around the immurement motif, the female victim’s disappearance makes space for other sacrificed bodies, and these are increasingly male. Carol Delaney explains a very interesting family-type dynamic between the state and the nation at the point of transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the modern Turkish Republic. She defines the Ottoman Empire as a “Father State” type of government, ruled by the sultan and characterized by the millet system, in which national and religious groups defined themselves by common culture rather than by territory: “The notion of a circumscribed body of land isomorphic with the body politic was absent.”17 Therefore, the plea that Kemal Ataturk made to the people of the empire about to be partitioned by the capitulation and peace treaty terms following World War I was precisely the one that gestured toward this up-to-then unacknowledged connection between the nation and its “Motherland.” His emotional appeal about the Motherland, the territory/body they all shared and that was to be “prostituted” and “mutilated” by the partition, called for the protection and clear delineation of the boundaries of the new

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nation-state, the process that, by analogy, made the people related by kinship ties.18 Needless to say, the identical argument was simultaneously used by the many now newly liberated nation-states, or “motherlands,” that emerged out of the centuries-long Ottoman statehood.19 We could claim that the substitution of woman as symbol in the century marked by the ultimate nationalist fervor in the Balkans is an anomaly, but it is also a logical condition, given the political and historical circumstances. Although the symbolism of the female body could be expected to gain in significance in the nationalist project these texts address, the ritual female victim abruptly disappears from the site of political spectacle. Yet if we consider that the nationalist idiom manifested itself in endless wars amid a constantly shifting political landscape, ethno-religious identities, and ever-emerging nation-states, the masculinization of the sacrificial victim also signals a more emphatic social and historical change. The narratives I will discuss further transpose the discourse from one of constructing a mythical community-nation, in which the female victim has a prominent symbolic meaning, to one about invading or defending it, in which the attack upon a nation is analogous to the violation of its patriarchal hierarchy. In the historical framework that informs these texts, the designated female victim has all but lost its former symbolic value and is increasingly substituted by various male bodies of socially or politically marginal subjects whose stigmatized difference condemns them to a less than ritualistic sacrifice. The sacrificed body (now predominantly male) carries only a marginal role in the system that sacrifices him, and it is precisely his social marginality that marks him as an appropriate sacrificial offering. Popular mythology, however, regularly endows his victimhood with a greater meaning than it objectively has, and his sacrifice is frequently posthumously elevated to a heroic death.

The Irony of Sacrifice The two best-known novels from the Balkans that rewrite the immurement legend through the national paradigm are Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina and Ismail Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge.20 The Bridge on the Drina is a well-known text, and as a Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andrić is a familiar name beyond the Balkan context. Audiences would be less familiar with one of the most recent fictional narratives to deal with the immurement legend, Aris Fakinos’s The Dream of Master Builder Nikitas (1998), which nevertheless introduces some very recent events in the Balkans to the discussion about sacrificial economy. Separated by a considerable time gap, Andrić’s novel dating from 1945 and Kadare’s from 1978, the two texts are often compared to one another, mostly in the way they both deal with the legend of A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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sacrifice in a bridge. Both novels revolve around the erection of their central “character,” a bridge that becomes the center of and synonymous with the community in which it is constructed. Both witness the effects that global historical events inflict upon their respective Bosnian and Albanian communities and share the destinies caused by those events. In that sense, the bridge in The Bridge on the Drina represents the locus of collective consciousness that is at first “created like collective consciousness, but later becomes part of it.”21 It becomes the site that will resonate with any exterior influence or internal conflict affecting the town. The community itself rises around the bridge, erected as a gift of Grand Vizier Mehmed Pasha Sokolović from Istanbul, who was abducted from the village by the Ottomans as a boy and taken to serve in the janissary corps.22 Many years later, once he is the second-most powerful person in the empire, he decides to construct a bridge to better connect the village of his birth with the empire, which also serves as a symbolic link between his two identities. Everything that takes place on and around the novel’s central “protagonist” is intended to demonstrate the process of community construction and development, although the course of history requires sacrifices that the local people consider too high or even unacceptable. In the period of four centuries during which Andrić’s novel records the life of the bridge and its community, perception of the structure alters, from being considered an imposition upon the local Christian population by the occupying Ottomans, to being seen both as an inseparable element of the natural landscape and as part of collective and individual memory. All the sacrifices that are made for, on, and around the bridge impress it more firmly in the local consciousness, until the bridge and the community become synonymous with each other. The fate of the one reflects the destiny of the other. In stark opposition to what comes through as Andrić’s rather neutral if not even benevolent view of sacrifices required by both the edifice and the community surrounding it, Ismail Kadare’s bridge on the Ujana e Keqe river is part of an elitist capitalist enterprise whose economic interest shows a blatant disregard for tradition, humanity, and natural forces. The bridge that is being erected on the Ujana e Keqe in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of medieval Arberia, and consequently the rest of the Balkans, is perceived as an imposition by the conquerors and by the local corrupt elites, who are paid and blackmailed into disseminating a false idea of “sacrifice for progress” among the local population. After all, it will be the locals who pay for the construction, both in money and in blood, and who pay the price of the imminent conquest facilitated by that very structure. In order to make the idea more palatable to the people, two competing businesses, the

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“Raft and Boats” company and the “Roads and Bridges” company, engage in a perverse process of fabricating local legends, language, superstitions, and customs. For the purpose of promoting the project of bridge building, the construction company does not shun sacrificing a live man to the structure, but here his compliance is bound with a legal contract. Perhaps least prone to the idealization of both traditional ethics and progressive ideas is the stonemason in Fakinos’s The Dream of Master Builder Nikitas, whose project of erecting a bridge over a dangerous precipice challenges the people, disinterested in his vision and protective of their “traditional way of life”— the formulaic phrase signifying little more than a screen for stubborn complacency in the face of their own lack of freedom and dubious mercantile practices. Artemis Leontis reminds us that the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, was a time when trade flourished and when the construction of a system of paved roads helped both commercial and military expansion: “At the same time, with road travel superseding water passage and bridges consequently replacing ferries (and ferrymen), populations lost some of their autonomy.”23 Such construction facilitated territorial encroachment and cultural invasion but also internal divisions imminent to these transformations—only some of the reasons why traditional communities oppose and fear modernizing projects that barely occlude aggressive commercial interests. Hence the ominous reiterations in The Three-Arched Bridge of the dangers that the construction of roads brings for the population of Albania: One only had to see those barrels loaded with that horrible stuff to be sure that only wizards could take to such a trade, and alas for anyone who permitted carts to cross his land loaded with these barrels, that leak drops of tar in the heat, sprinkling the roads—no, what do I mean, sprinkling?—staining the roads with the devil’s black blood. And these drops of pitch always sow disaster. Now it has become a main raw material for war, and this great wizard is selling it everywhere, to the Turks and Byzantium on one hand, and to all the counts and dukes of Arberia on the other, fomenting quarrels on both sides.24

All three novels spell out the threat to local populations that arrives with the construction of roads and, by extension, bridges, as their sole purpose seems to be to facilitate the conquest of territories. The bridges bring mixed blessings to the communities in question, yet while Andrić tends to present his Drina bridge as a straightforward imposition of the Ottoman occupiers, which grows to become the center of the community, Kadare and Fakinos A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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instead focus on the aggressive expansion that underlies the construction of their bridges. At times of national crisis a return to the legendary and traditional presents itself as a viable alternative to external influences. Small wonder then that the communities in these novels, as well as in Kazantzakis’s play, turn to their folk traditions, trying to revert, or at least defer, the imminent danger. Andrić’s bridge is a gift, albeit laced with pragmatic intentions. However much this legacy to his people is supposed to heal the painful rift that has been growing in the grand vizier’s chest since he crossed the river as a child, it nevertheless has the practical purpose of constructing a road allowing further westward expansion of the empire. His enterprise causes additional suffering, especially to the Christian population in the valley, due to a particularly cruel supervisor of the construction works. As a consequence, the legend of the water fairy, undoing by night what the workers build by day and demanding a human sacrifice, begins to circulate: The common people easily make up fables and spread them quickly, wherein reality is strangely and inextricably mixed and interwoven with legend. The peasants who listened at night to the gusle player said that the vila who was destroying the bridge had told Abidaga that she would not cease her work of destruction until twin children, Stoja and Ostoja by name, should be walled into the foundations. Many swore that they had seen the guards who were searching for such a pair of children in the villages (the guards were indeed going around the villages but they were not looking for children but listening for rumours and interrogating the people in order to try and find out who were those unknown persons who were destroying the bridge).25

The local population manipulates the legend with rumors that the foundations require a human sacrifice, only to cover up for the peasant workers who destroy them in defiance of the Ottoman imposition of hard labor for an enterprise that will in the long run only benefit the empire. Andrić’s narrator rationalizes the legend by having the superstition initiated by the peasants turn against them: the Turks fear no water fairies, and they know where to search for the culprits. Neither the peasants nor the oppressors take the legend seriously, and each side manipulates it to reinforce their particular claim.26 The peasants’ story is thus a failed ploy from the beginning, yet they persist with their (self-)deception. However, they themselves treat it with an equal amount of irony when they tell a half-witted woman who has had stillborn twins that her children were buried in the bridge foundations. Unable to comprehend any rational explication for the death of her babies, the woman

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ends up being the only one who takes the legend at face value. The legendary and the mythical underlie everyday experience but inhabit a distinct metarational realm. In the space of merely one chapter that Andrić dedicates to the actual legend, his calm and distanced narration represents it as a phenomenon that is inextricable from the people’s tradition but that necessitates metacognitive and irrational states of mind in order to be believed. Ottomans ultimately subvert the superstition by executing the Serbian peasant responsible for nocturnal damage to the edifice; he is impaled alive in one of the most gruesome torture scenes in literary history. In mockery of the religion of the local Christian population, the man’s tortured body, still twitching on the stick, is exposed at a prominent place on the bridge as a warning and a tool of dissuasion against further acts of sabotage. Even here the narrator’s sobering voice breaks up the spell of the peasant’s heroic myth-in-themaking whose rising he foretells, when he says that to the observers of the horrific spectacle the villager appeared “too wretched and too insignificant to have done the deed which now brought him to execution.”27 However, collective consciousness operates in mechanisms that soon transform the peasant’s impaled body into a ritual sacrifice for his community, religion, and class, in opposition and as a constant threat to the Ottomans. From then on the Ottomans are forced to curb the cult of martyrdom and a new mythology of the oppressed that evolves around this episode. In a strange sequence of events that Andrić’s narration ascribes to “circumstances,” the bridge claims more lives during and immediately following the phase of its construction. The only truly immured victim, however, is a young “Arab” assistant to the master mason, as the locals tag a foreign builder employed on the site, whose lower body remains buried under a stone block that falls on him in the bridge’s middle pillar—the one that four centuries later will be the exact site where the bridge gets blown up. A fading memory of this particular victim gets significantly altered throughout the centuries, but the site where his body lies inside the bridge remains as a constant deterrent for local urchins playing around the bridge. Transformed into a demon that lurks around the edifice, the Arab is said to transmit his curse to those who disturb his spirit in stone recesses and dark corners.28 This line of mysterious events also includes the rather bizarre murder of the grand vizier himself, who is stabbed by an unknown man in Istanbul soon after the completion of the bridge. His own ambition, unlike that of his predecessors, including the Serbian king Vukašin from the Skadar epic and the master builders from multiple bridge ballads, is punished not only by the death of the innocent victim but by his own death as well. Needless to say, the peasant who is caught in the act of destroying the bridge is already far from A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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the unsuspecting wife-victim, as he may well have known that the punishment for his transgression was death. Yet the vizier’s aspiration to span the gap left after his abduction as a boy and his forceful immersion in a different, alien identity and culture is likewise paid by the ultimate price. His edifice looks solid and remains intact for centuries, but it never stops being the site of feuds, invasions, and death. Dragan Kujundžić sees Andrić’s bridge in an ambivalent relationship between birth and death, as a “sarcophagus of history” that “keeps and eats away the bodily remains,” although it is also considered to be a “source of nourishment, fertility, a breast of sorts, a giant mother, but also the site of a violent, deadly separation, a sarcophagus for the newly born walled into the bridge to die.”29 This ambivalence replicates the dynamic informing Ivo Andrić’s entire opus—a “disgust with history and [a] desire to return to it.”30 As such, the bridge acquires the meaning of a tombstone for predominantly male victims ranging from young boys taken from their mothers to the mighty patron of the bridge. With Andrić, the womanin-the-bridge persists only by extension of the ancient metaphor through the apparently nourishing properties of the bridge “milk” that leaks from the limestone of which it is made, or in the figure of the madwoman who roams the construction site looking for her stillborn children. Most notably, it lives on in yet another metaphor the bridge assumes—that of the “umbilical cord” between the kidnapped boys and their wailing mothers.31 Grand Vizier Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, the sponsor of the construction, had just such a connection in mind when he attempted to reach out to his old and eradicated self and tie it to what he had become.

Progress as Sacrifice This is the point at which the legend about the bridge construction comes to a close, and in the next chapter Andrić’s narrative assumes the distinctly rational tone of a chronicle with the evident aim of telling the history of Bosnia as a microcosm of the Balkans but also of all similar places, regions, and peoples that face each other at a crossing point but are never entirely capable of managing their own destinies. Ultimately it demonstrates the limits of human perception and of humans’ tendency to gauge events exclusively by the measure to which they are personally affected. As time runs its course in the small bridge community, Andrić dedicates merely a few chapters to a span of about three centuries. The novel catches up with history once again in its last hundred years, when the pace of both history and narration accelerates to the point at which it becomes obvious that only something of epic magnitude will be able to stop it. However irrational, based solely on a capricious demand by a, for the

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most part, undefined supernatural force, the sacrifice of a female body in the novel is consistently substituted by the sacrifice of men who die on the bridge in random accidents. All of these male bodies seem to be victims of chance; still their deaths are quickly appropriated by a religious or national cause and become part of communal mythology. In an incident that introduces a whole chain of beheadings of Christian peasants by an Ottoman “headsman,” a villager and a priest are beheaded for merely expressing sympathy for the leader of the Serbian uprising against the Ottomans of 1804: “So these two, whom no one before then had ever seen or heard of, remained together in memory, a memory clearer and more lasting than that of so many other, more important victims,” Andrić concludes about this event.32 The social marginality of all the victims, from the peasant who destroys the bridge’s foundations to the last man who dies at the moment of its demise, seems to replicate the liminality of the sacrificed woman in the legend, perpetuated both in her social and in her familial relations. Ruth Mandel interprets the choice of the wife of the master builder as sacrificial victim over his female relatives in “The Bridge of Arta” as coming about by virtue of her being an outsider in her husband’s family and thus replaceable, unlike his mother or sister.33 By analogy, the sacrificed bodies of both Andrić’s and Kadare’s bridges belong to social “outsiders”—peasants, foreign workers, randomly chosen villagers. In Andrić’s narrative the nationalist enterprise does not demonstrate the need for the sacrifice of female bodies (or children’s bodies, for that matter), and the violence is perpetuated against random other bodies. Just as expectedly, while the legend of the immured woman rapidly disappears from collective memory, male victims killed at the bridge are memorialized by the community even centuries after their death. Radisav, the impaled/crucified peasant, achieves the status of a martyr and persists in legends, glorified as a saint fallen for his people and for Christianity. Even the Arab, who is transformed into a ghost inhabiting the hidden recesses of the structure and coming out at night, continues to feed the imagination of the children playing around the bridge. When, many centuries after his alleged death, upon annexing Bosnia in 1908, the Austrians plant explosives in a hole drilled on the bridge and cover it with a metal door, the story of the terrifying Arab takes on an entirely new meaning. The Austrian invasion of the sleepy bridge community disturbs ancient habits and threatens with its alienness. Most of all, the Austrians’ time bomb ticking in the bridge’s foundation is an inauguration of World War I, the deadliest event in the bridge’s history, which spells the destruction of every concept of familiar political organization and which will in its wake produce a host of new national communities in the Balkans. Andrić posits the A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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period of the Austrian occupation of the Bosnian town as a zero point from which events begin to rapidly unwind, until they conclude with the bridge and their own existence blown up in an instant. This acceleration of history, as well as the condensation of Andrić’s narration, is what Zoran Milutinović recognizes as a project conducted by a “Faustian force” that seems addicted to the destruction of the old for the purpose of creating ever-new/ modified concepts that are of necessity always temporary, as this force’s lifeblood is perpetual destruction and mutation.34 Modernization, which Milutinović ascribes exclusively to Austrians, thus assumes the prerogatives of a cosmic, universal force in constant metamorphosis. It defines its neurosis as “progress” in messianic service of the improvement of the human condition, although its obsessive transmutations frequently appear to be an end in themselves. The new empire shows none of the sense of continuity and undisturbed existence that the Ottomans demonstrated during the bridge’s construction and throughout its “drowsy” ages. It invests itself not in solid or timeless projects, but instead in new means of rapid transportation (the rail line). The treatment that the bridge is subjected to under the Austrian occupation is one of endless inspections, measurements, cleaning, reparations, electrification—all this trouble, as Alihodja the bridge guardian notices, only to have the bridge mined and blown up in the end! But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of all these modern impositions, which take no less a toll on the population of the Bosnian town than the Ottoman decrees used to, is that they are by far better tolerated than those enforced by the former master. The Austrian army looks cleaner and shinier, arriving unaccompanied by rumors; their commander is seemingly characterless, unmemorable, and generally unfriendly, and everything around them breathes out an air of bureaucratic efficiency. The new government not only keeps itself and its people constantly employed, even with the most seemingly bizarre tasks (toilet inspection), but also keeps everybody in the town on their toes. Nobody and nothing will be left in peace and indolent slumber ever again. Nothing is taken for granted, and everything needs to be prescribed by this particular measure or that; even the most obviously common things must be regulated and put into writing. The taxes that the Ottomans had to extort from the populace are now handed in peacefully, although they amount to no less than the Ottoman dues. Even, as Milutinović notices, the infamous “blood tribute” of taking young boys to serve the sultan is merely transformed into mandatory military service. Despite the fact that the Austrians block Bosnian boys from following the path of Grand Vizier Sokolović and excelling in their service, this imposition seems to go



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down more easily than anything the Ottomans took by force.35 And the only reason for this seems to be the fact that it is regulated by the government that rules over the people like the invisible hand of God, through proclamations and disinterested coercion.36 The arrival of European capitalism to Bosnia creates new opportunities and with them new challenges and even a new social class—an idea that Andrić develops through the narrative of the rise and fall of the Jewish entrepreneur Lotte and her hotel, complete with social phenomena begotten by the types that an establishment of that sort attracts. This overly brief period (in comparison with the centuries of uneventful slumber in which the town was arrested during its Ottoman colonial era) also spells a speedy deterioration for the same short-lived bourgeois class, as well as the emergence of new ideas of nationhood and class struggle that begin to circulate. Modernization in this ultimate sense means a rapid import of new political and social ideas from the West by the youth educated there. These young revolutionaries replace the old set of Ottoman subjects who used the bridge as a space to meet and discuss various subjects, usually with respect for each other’s differences and without desire to stir the situation to change. Although these youth fall victim to police persecution, torture, and execution, they persist in their activities. Needless to say, Andrić modeled these people on Gavrilo Princip and his fellow conspirators in the assassination of the Austrian archduke in 1914, all of them willing sacrifices for another national idea.37 The 1914 Sarajevo assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Serbian student gave this Western empire a much-desired pretext for war. This event, which was the beginning of the dissolution of two great empires stretching over half of Europe, also brought an end to the importance of both the bridge and its community: “The great stone bridge which, according to the ideas and the pious intentions of the Grand Vizier from Sokolovići, was meant to link the two parts of the Empire, and ‘for the love of God’ make easier the passage from West to East and from East to West, was now in fact cut off from both East and West and abandoned like a stranded ship or a deserted shrine.”38 The narrative, however, continues to insist on the inalterability of the bridge, although it is now de facto devoid of its former significance: “The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between two warring sides.”39 Even after the explosion that destroys the bridge’s central pier, the rupture seems to be temporary, affecting it only up to that particular point where the gap was created, because immediately behind the gaping hole of the missing arch, everything recommences

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and stands as it always has: “There was no longer any seventh pier; between the sixth and the eighth yawned a gulf through which [Alihodja] could see the green waters of the river. From the eighth pier onward the bridge once more stretched to the farther bank, smooth and regular and white, as it had been yesterday and always.”40

Tradition and the Rhetoric of Elitist Manipulation Both Andrić and Kadare draw their bridges and communities as being synonymous with the greater history of the two nations and, ultimately, the rest of the Balkans and Europe. Despite the fact that Andrić’s novel deplores human tragedy in the face of turbulent events, it still contains an aspect of reconciliation with history. His dispassionate treatment of pivotal historical events suggests that even though the sacrifices are not exactly necessary, or even less welcome for the sake of the unstoppable encroachment of history, it is imperative that they at least be acknowledged and remembered. The mythology that surrounds the bridge in the course of its construction and its later existence is a way of coping with history, of understanding and appropriating it. Kadare, on the other hand, has a very different relationship with myth and history and interprets both as instrumental in the long continuum of the elites’ manipulation of gullibility and the ignorance of the masses, notwithstanding the political regime in power. His novel likewise tells a tale of the repetition of history, but in his case it is the history of exploitation, which tends to perceive the masses as a passive and malleable receptacle, shamelessly instrumentalized in the elites’ power games. Implying that sacrifices made for any idea or institution are unnecessary waste instigated and justified by empty rhetoric, his novel remains a decisive condemnation of all discourse that advocates the curbing of social freedoms, regardless of whether that discourse is considered “ideological” or “totalitarian” in the narrow sense. A major pitfall of the novel, however, is that this important idea is forced through an emphatically dichotomous representation of the encroachment of alien influences and ideologies (Islam, Slavic culture, communism) onto a never disrupted Albanian continuity (Albanian culture as autochthonous, Albania as the last bastion of European values), which is an unfortunate occurrence in some of Kadare’s work.41 Most importantly, although written in 1978—and since the fall of communism in Albania, Kadare himself has promulgated the idea that it was intended as a protest against communist ideology—the novel seems equally relevant to the contemporary political scene in the Balkans and Eastern Europe in general. Likely against the author’s intentions, the novel can also read as if it were communicating a

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critical response to the current postcommunist political context of social transformation that the Balkan states need to undergo on their way toward EU and NATO integration, a process not infrequently perceived as a surrender of various degrees of national sovereignty. In that respect, The ThreeArched Bridge carries a very ironic vision of the sacrifices required of societies in order to meet new but not always acceptable standards. Gjon, Kadare’s monk-narrator, attempts to impose himself as a trustworthy source, claiming to be telling the “truth” in his chronicle of events surrounding the construction of the bridge on Ujana e Keqe. It is clear from Gjon’s opening, in which he claims that the sacrifice at the bridge was a plain act of murder, that this novel intends to deal decisively with the tendency of the human imagination to defer confrontation with reality by means of the production of myths and superstitions. For this reason, the text mercilessly bares the process of mythmaking through which the ancient legend is modified and misused by the two competing enterprises in their attempts to draw profit from and gain absolute control over human mobility. In Kadare’s universe, the legend is little more than a vehicle for attaining political advantage or economic profit: “The ballad had been changed. It was not about three brothers building a castle wall, but about dozens of masons building a bridge. The bridge was built during the day and destroyed at night by the spirits of the water. It demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bard sang.”42 Kadare’s narrative centers on the sacrifice of a man caught destroying the structure, while the legend is progressively deconstructed, reduced to motives of pure greed on the side of its promoters and of helplessness and ignorance on the part of the people. The legend mutates several times before its bloody climax, which is triggered by the actions of the two rival companies—each bribing a host of tradition makers, bards, legend collectors, and even an epileptic—in promoting their particular version of the immurement and swaying the opinion of the locals to support or hinder the construction enterprise. Contrary to the proverbial claim that the “people remember,” in their alteration of traditional knowledge, Kadare’s elites count precisely on the bliss of collective oblivion. Whatever it is that once used to be remembered as the “original” version of the legend of immurement undergoes several transformations, with inspiration duly supplied by the monk Gjon himself, until it resembles a mere job advertisement. Even the purported sacrifice of the man who goes out at night to damage the structure is economically motivated: he is paid to delay the construction by one company and is caught and killed by the other. Gjon’s chronicle records: “But in whatever way the incident had happened, its essence remained unchanged: the bridge builders had murdered Murrash A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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Zenebisha in cold blood and immured him. The crime had only one purpose—to inspire terror.”43 The interested parties take all the precautions of sustaining the simulacrum of the man’s purported willing sacrifice, despite the fact that rumors circulate of a conspiracy to murder the peasant. Still, they never evolve into anything more than rumors, and the construction proceeds as planned. To paraphrase Žižek, the elites know exactly what they are doing, but they are still doing it because they can count on public disinterestedness and conformity. One could justifiably wonder, then, why so much trouble is taken in order to ensure the purported public consensus and the smokescreen of the “legality” of the move when, aside from some token protestations, no significant opposition to even the most obvious breach of rights can be expected in reality. Why not simply murder the man and wait for the storm following his execution to abate? The most likely answer is that the companies plainly try to save appearances not for the people, but for the “innocent gaze of the Big Other.”44 This big Other, however, is located neither in the persona of the Arberian prince nor in the people, but in public opinion itself, the semblance of democratic consensus, that is. Maintaining appearances is one of the paradoxes of communism, and of highly bureaucratized systems in general, in which everybody knows that the entire structure is hollow and corrupt, and few take anything at face value. Still, the party/elites and everybody involved (which includes just about every single individual) persevere in upholding the lie.45 The insistence on telling the “truth” in cases of torture, even when both the torturer and the victim know that the confession is a fabrication, and the endless time taken for the extraction, alteration, and reproduction of false statements by victims in the hands of interrogators is a plain and clean example of the extent to which this pointless exercise is taken seriously.46 However, this seemingly bizarre spectacle in which lies are consciously upheld by both parties ultimately creates the compromised subject, who partakes in the collective phenomenon of “shared guilt.”47 Such false cohesion, and thus a false community of the compromised, helps the regime ensure that “in one way or another, the majority of people [are] somehow morally discredited, compelled to violate their own moral standards.”48 Signing of false confessions, denunciations, and any similar acts of moral depravity that the individual is either forced to conform to or commits willingly and out of fear or an exaggerated sense of social duty become the kinds of actions that affect the recruitment of complicit subjects, essential in upholding every repressive social enterprise. Such regimes “rel[y] on or actively condon[e] the moral bankruptcy of [their] subjects.”49



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With this in mind let us linger a little longer on the character of the immured man, Murrash Zanebisha, in Kadare’s novel. One of the rumors has it that he signed a contract of willing sacrifice in exchange for a substantial remuneration, to be paid to his family upon his immurement into the structure. This may or may not be the truth; he could just as well be the paid agent of the competing enterprise, who was caught in the act and executed on the spot. Either way, his interest in the dangerous and life-threatening nocturnal activity is founded on the promise of some kind of monetary compensation, which in the ultimate analysis makes him no more than a mercenary who disappears in action. After all, by signing the contract he affirms himself aware of the potential danger that his exposure carries with it and willingly accepts the risk. Nevertheless, this reading cannot do away with just a hint of fatalism that his act of sacrifice entails—the compensation would enable his family to live prosperously, something that he cannot provide otherwise. That way Murrash Zanebisha becomes worth more dead than alive. The monk-narrator is privy to the invention of the new lore by those in power for the exclusive purpose of manipulating the masses, but he is also an accomplice in the process who recognizes himself in the face of the victim, whose eyes haunt him underneath thick layers of cement. As the narrative culminates and the “barbarian” threat closes in on the lands of Arberia, the people gradually get used to the bridge, while the monk begins to identify with the immured man. At this point the narrative allows a rare selfreflective step out of its own body in order to incorporate (literally) not only the narrator but also the notion of the writer, Kadare himself, who is, in a Foucauldian sense, “sacrificing” himself to/in his own text. The novel reveals itself for a mise-en-abyme foreshadowing the potential victimization of the narrator/writer for communicating the truth: the truth that was always known by all but that should never be uttered: “I felt I should return to the presbytery as soon as I could to complete my chronicle. I should return as soon as possible and finish it, because times are black; soon night may fall, it will be too late for everything, and we may pay with our lives for writing such testimonies. This was the immured man’s message. And this chronicle, like the bridge itself, may demand a sacrifice, and that sacrifice can be none other than myself.”50 Hiding underneath a narrative about capitalist competition between the boats and the bridges companies lies the subtext that Kadare always intended according to his own admission but that remains one of the politically contested aspects of his entire oeuvre:51 “In [The Three-Arched Bridge] I mainly dealt with the ancient theme of sacrifice. That was one of the fundamental

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themes of communist propaganda: sacrifice for the sake of the future! It justified everything: poverty, boredom, and especially oppression. There, I described a sacrifice which was nothing other than a premeditated murder, and thus a crime.”52 This is, basically, the posteffect analysis given by Kadare himself in one of several self-defensive attempts at clearing his biography of accusations of his complicity with the regime of the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.53 Therefore, the anxiety that the monk Gjon feels at the sight of the man’s immured body, his fear that he is putting his own life in peril by revealing the murder underneath the accepted fiction of sacrifice, and his ultimate identification with the figure of the transgressor against the impositions of the new order obscure from the reader the identity of the real transgressor—Kadare himself.54 What remains the most convincing aspect of this novel, despite Kadare’s rather mythical approach to the national question, is that it denudes the operation of the very apparatus of myth. Kadare distrusts both myth and history, demonstrating that they are little else but the means of facilitating manipulative discourse employed by a joint economical-political enterprise for the purpose of exploiting the masses. He utilizes the very discourse that he is apparently trying to deconstruct when he fashions the Albania of the nationalist imaginary in an attempt to disclose the modus operandi of all mythical thinking. His condemnation of the process of mythmaking as an elitist enterprise, which deploys the knowledge and skills of its most literate and educated strata in order to exploit the abysmal ignorance and compliance of the masses, displays the very role of the intellectual, not rarely utilized as little more than the ventriloquist of the establishment, who actively participates in the creation and dissemination of official fictions through which the regime perpetuates itself. If this were indeed Kadare’s intention, it would exhibit the ultimate cynicism regarding his own position as a beneficiary of the Albanian communist dictatorship. The dubious benefits of what is universally declared to be “progress” or “modernization,” regardless of provenance, are what Aris Fakinos made the subject of his “bridge” novel, The Dream of Master Builder Nikitas. Despite the fact that he situates the text in eighteenth-century Greece, then still under Ottoman colonization, there can be little doubt that it was considerably influenced by the seismic shifts on the Balkan political scene following the fall of communism, especially by the never-ending Yugoslav crisis and Bosnian war.55 A discovery of complete documentation related to the bridging of an abysmal canyon in Greek Epirus causes Fakinos’s contemporary narrator to muse over the history of the broken bridge and its maker, the builder Nikitas. Master Nikitas’s idea of bridging the “deepest and most dangerous”

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gorge in the Balkans (the Greek word for gorge, haradra, is repeated so many times in the narrative that it achieves an almost supernatural spell over the reader) is in fact a vision of a new and different universe that Nikitas shares with a few of his coworkers and his French correspondent. Interspersed in Fakinos’s social critique of contemporary Greece are historical events falling into the second half of the eighteenth century, the time of the wars for liberation from the Ottomans but also of the penetration of Enlightenment ideas into the culture of Greece.56 As always, the bridge is a double-edged sword, bringing different and supposedly progressive civilizational values to the population, but at the cost of the loss of some traditional ethics and integrity. In place of the usual village witches and prophets we encounter in other renditions of the legend, Nikitas is forewarned of the treacherous path he has taken by a priest who interprets Nikitas’s vision as “bad” and voices God’s request that he should return to Him and abandon his idealism.57 In Fakinos religion assumes an equally conservative role, of keeping the people on the well-trodden path, as do pre-Christian traditions in Kazantzakis and other authors who examine the same motif. There is some mention of ghosts and phantasms, but Nikitas’s main problem in the beginning is in fact the financing of the project. The novel to a large extent tends to reiterate the idea about the Balkans as a site where powerful political players have historically settled their accounts and that the Western public has utilized for flaunting their philanthropy and as a topic of their salon conversations.58 General silence is the response to most of the letters Nikitas sends seeking support in the West, while others return with a few empty phrases of moral support for the enterprise Nikitas and his people are going to undertake.59 Basically, any attempt of the Balkan nations to find understanding for the construction of peaceful coexistence in the region is sabotaged by the disinterestedness or direct intervention of powerful political factors. Thus Nikitas’s bridge is completed solely thanks to the determination of the builders and the local people, who dig the earth and break the stones with their bare hands. Edmund, Nikitas’s French correspondent, encourages Nikitas to persevere in the endeavor, claiming that the bridge is just the “beginning of many to come in the future” and that progress and knowledge are unstoppable.60 Enthusiasm is at its peak, and the bridge is seen as the road to the European ideals of liberty and enlightenment. Yet Fakinos complicates the plot that in Kadare turns into a binary relationship, of the proverbially detrimental encroachment of alien values upon the native culture, facilitated by the modernizing project of transportation communications. Fakinos’s local population is far from a passive crowd of benevolent dwellers ignorant of the opportunity that opens up for them A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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with the construction of the bridge, and is instead hungry for trade and the money it earns them. But the European Enlightenment brings not only the light of knowledge and the ideals of human liberation and individualism in its wake but also practices that threaten to disturb more ancient values and beliefs. With the completion of the bridge the area becomes the crossroads of migration that is both legal and illegal, of trade but also of various illicit and dangerous activities in which the local population seems just as much willing participants as do newcomers and suspicious strangers in transit through the territory. With the rise in commerce the village experiences the emergence of various kinds of negative phenomena it had not known before. Disappointed in his own people but still believing in Enlightenment ideals, Nikitas claims that the light of Europe has descended upon a nation that is used to living in the dark and has “developed the mentality of the mole.”61 However, the overall disillusionment with European values and the legacy of the French Revolution increases, and both Edmund and Nikitas realize that the “Ottoman darkness” is not unique to either the Greeks or the Balkans, but is in fact the universal human condition. In his final and unsent letter to Edmund, Nikitas suggests that although “nothing changes with history,” at least “demolishing a bridge is easy.”62 His bridge falls victim to both history and human pettiness, and the disillusioned engineer decides to blow himself up together with his masterpiece in order to put an end to the imminent degeneration of the community it disturbed. Ironically, even though the builder Nikitas likes to view himself as the one upholding local tradition, he requests that a new myth of his bridge be made into a folk song and preserved in the local monastery. Master Nikitas thus becomes a fabricator and manipulator of traditional lore to the same extent as Kadare’s despised profit-and-market-oriented entrepreneurial elites.63 As a victim Nikitas distinguishes himself from all the other victims, in the novels discussed here and throughout this volume. What makes him different from all the rest is the fact that he is the creator both of the edifice and of his own death. He is not tricked or cajoled into death, nor is he executed by another’s hand. Instead of merely succumbing to death, he wills it. Nikitas is the architect of the whole undertaking, just as he plans his own death because he is disappointed by the developments his bridge made possible. Nevertheless, in spite of his not being led to the sacrifice, or perhaps precisely because of it, his death is neither mythologized nor glorified by tradition. Lore tends to elevate victims and celebrate defeat; it restores dignity to the humiliated—and Nikitas seemingly had a grip over his destiny. Does his death, therefore, fall within the boundaries defined at the beginning of this volume? I think it does, because regardless of his deterministic spirit, which

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is even more emphatic than that of Kazantzakis’s Master Builder, Nikitas is still pushed to his self-sacrifice by the incorrigible baseness he perceived in his compatriots and the human race in general. He may have “conquered” the deepest of precipices, but his life’s work was undermined by the combination of history’s unfathomable designs and impenetrable human darkness.

National Community between Legend and History By way of conclusion, I would like to refer back to the beginning of this chapter, where I argue that twentieth-century literary renditions of the immurement legend directly speak to nation-forming modernist projects at several points pivotal for Balkan history. Andrić’s novel covers a period of almost four centuries, from the Ottoman colonization of Bosnia to the beginning of World War I. This is also the lifespan of his bridge. Although history seems to play a compelling role in the novel, since many of the events described in the text are historical, as is the grand vizier himself, Andrić treats history more as a backdrop against which revolve (hi)stories and legends that drive the community. The story of the bridge and its history is therefore a mythistorical rather than a properly historical narrative, where the origin of a nation-community derives from myth, but its persistence and appeal through the ages show that the myth must be founded on some substance.64 The task of history is to “illuminate” not to “eliminate” myths, and this is precisely what Andrić does in The Bridge on the Drina, where, despite all the irony with which he treats the legend of the immurement, he articulates the narrative in the direction of creating collective mythical/ historical consciousness, with the bridge as its central locus. History happens on the bridge, but the bridge itself and its origins are already deeply steeped in the mythical narrative that everybody living around it has always known as the unchanging truth of its and their own existence. We can better comprehend this precarious borderline between the historical and the mythical from some of Andrić’s other writings. In Conversations with Goya we read: “it is useless and mistaken to look for sense in the seemingly important but meaningless events taking place around us. . . . We should look for it in those layers which the centuries have built up around the few main legends of humanity. These layers constantly, if ever less faithfully, reproduce the form of that grain of truth around which they gather, and so carry it through the centuries. The true history of mankind is contained in fairy stories, they make it possible to guess, if not to discover, its meaning.”65 Andrić’s narrative is generated by a fluctuation between an imposition of change and resistance to and denial of that change.66 The narrative rushes forward with imminent change affecting the lives of all who live around the A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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bridge and the river, with the exception of the bridge and the river themselves, which continue to inhabit their space with mythical immutability. The omniscient (and metahistorical) narrator keeps insisting on the community’s inability to perceive change or, rather, on their denial of change. The reader is led to believe that however history progresses and whatever people do, the essence of their existence—the bridge and the spirit of the community constructed around it—remains unalterable and unaffected. Like the insistence on the permanence of the bridge, the unconscious failure, or perhaps the conscious refusal to notice the transformations occurring with the passage of time, plays a constitutive part in the development of the narrative. It is only toward the end of the novel that the deceiving lull by which the bridge was surrounded, like the eternal pounding of the river against its foundations, is cut short by an event that was ominously anticipated many times in the text. Historically, this part of the narrative begins with the events of the Balkan wars in 1912–13, which saw the end of the Ottoman occupation of its last bastion in the Balkans, Bosnia, with all its other former possessions already free for several decades. With the definite arrival of modern (i.e., European) history on the bridge-stage, the pace of events accelerates, and the failure of the community to acknowledge the changes can be understood only as conscious denial: “By a strange exception, just these things which were of such great importance to the fate of the bridge and the town and all who lived in it came silently and almost unnoticed.”67 This emphasized slumber forecasts fateful events that are soon to storm the country: “Time, it seemed, was holding its breath over the town. It was just then that it happened.”68 In his article “Inventing Greece,” Peter Bien draws a parallel between nationalism and religion, stating that the modern nation is imagined almost as an exact substitute for religion and has acquired all of its key attributes, including that of the ultimate sacrifice: “people fight and die all the time . . . for their nation . . . and seem seldom to question the appropriateness of such martyrdom, which means that the nation has usurped the role of religion in providing the ultimate justification for existence.”69 The national community, which appropriates the attributes thus far associated solely with God’s immortal being, slips into the emptied slot, positing itself as the next thing worth dying for. It assumes the functions of both the signified and the signifier of the religious system it dislocated: its presence as the entity to which the sacrificial body is offered is synonymous with that of the body itself.70 By means of this paradigmatic coup, the self-imagined collective body usurps God’s position, assuming the theological dogma of immortality. In its self-identification with a godlike substance, it puts forward the claim

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to the unrecordable antiquity of origin and even to the transubstantiating body that, whatever befalls it, will muster the strength to recreate itself and rise anew. Translated into Andrić’s metaphoric language, the transience of human events leaves no trace on the eternal body of the bridge; the bridge may suffer losses and injuries, but its immortal essence remains unalterable and indestructible. Andrić’s monotonous reiterations of community’s indestructibility in the face of rapid historical changes serve merely to feed this illusion of immortality. Almost every chapter of the text ends with a view of the bridge that stresses its permanence but that, in fact, reveals its vulnerability: “Its life, though mortal in itself, resembled eternity for its end could not be perceived.”71 The closer the narrative draws to an end, the more this chant confirming the unalterable state of the bridge on the Drina changes its tone, until it becomes clear that the destiny of the edifice is sealed: “The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between the two warring sides.”72 In acknowledging the historical changes that engulf it, the bridge community—the microcosmic Bosnian nation, that is—would plunge into a struggle with history and all this act entails: waking up to the social and political realities, the disturbance of centuries-old hierarchies, and the possibility of facing irreparable social ruptures in this model of multireligious cohabitation and tolerance. For that reason, the final scene, in which a mine detonates the explosive left on the bridge by the Austrians, carries a double symbolism.73 Not only is it the end of the colonial era of which the bridge is a material though silent witness and reminder, but it is also the end of a long period of significance for the true signified—the Balkans. The Balkans increasingly lose relevance as a “connecting bridge” between the East and West, as other parts of the globe gain historic momentum, and the Balkans are in effect left to struggle with their own insignificance and other problems of the colonial legacy. On the other hand, however, the destruction of the bridge carries the potential for a new beginning. It indeed arrived in the form of the liberation and unification of all south Slavs and the creation of their first common state—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia. The symbolism of Andrić’s narrative is at its most powerful in the closing of the novel, which witnesses the almost simultaneous death of the last true Ottoman subject, Alihodja, the hereditary guardian of the bridge, and the destruction of the bridge itself: “The kapia was there where it had always been, but just beyond the kapia the bridge stopped short. . . . The broken arches yawned painfully towards one another across the break.”74 Yet even at this apocalyptic moment, the dying Alihodja refuses to believe that his end and the cataclysmic destruction of the only world he knows represent the ultimate end of everything. His religious A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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consciousness sustains itself on the assumption that this current destruction cannot be the absurd ending of the world, whose meaning is determined by God himself, but that instead it must foreshadow a new beginning and a new creative impulse, at least somewhere else, if not here: If they destroy here, then somewhere else someone else is building. Surely there are still peaceful countries and men of good sense who know of God’s love? If God has abandoned this unlucky town on the Drina, he had surely not abandoned the whole world that was beneath the skies? . . . Perhaps this impure infidel faith that puts everything in order, cleans everything up, repairs and embellishes everything only in order suddenly and violently to demolish and destroy, might spread through the whole world; it might make of all God’s world an empty field for its senseless building and criminal destruction, a pasturage for its insatiable hunger and incomprehensible demands? Anything could happen. But one thing could not happen: it could not be that great and wise men of exalted soul who would raise lasting buildings for the love of God, so that the world should be more beautiful and man live in it better and more easily, should everywhere and for all time vanish from this earth. Should they too vanish, it would mean that the love of God was extinguished and had disappeared from the world. That could not be.75

From the point of the presence of nationalist discourse in the text, Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge renders itself open to a couple of readings that are rather schematic, but sadly they are the prisms through which most of Kadare’s opus has been interpreted over the past two decades. Such a reading allows for the unfortunate possibility of blurring most of the complexity of his ironic relationship with myth, in which he discloses the mechanisms through which myth operates. These two available interpretations, which have been the focus of a lot of critical debate, read the novel as either a political or a national allegory. They are both undeniably present in the text, but emphasizing either of the two without considering the more complex texture I have already discussed boils the novel down to a sad example of literature engagé in its purest form. The first of these readings emphasizes the nationalist subtext, which apparently originates in the political repression contemporaneous with the novel’s creation, as well as a sort of subversion of the political idiom of the time. The narrative of Kadare’s novel spans barely a decade and ends at a time preceding that of Andrić’s novel—perhaps even acting as its thematic introduction—prior to the Ottoman conquest of Albania, toward the end of the fourteenth century. In its entirety it is very interested in the definition of the Albanian nation as European, if not even

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proto-European. Although set in the times before the Ottoman conquest, it subtly draws a parallel between three historically removed conquests of the Albanian territory and three national crises set in the twentieth century. The first is the Roman conquest of ancient Illyria, which is mirrored in the Italian annexation of Albanian territory that took place in the wake of both world wars. Byzantium arrives hand in hand with the Orthodox religion, obviously treated as being as alien to the “authentic Albanian being” as the pressures of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox-turned-communist empire of equally sprawling East-West geography. Finally, the threat of the rising Ottoman Empire in the East duplicates the improbable 1970s alliance of the Albanian communist leadership with China after its fallout with the Soviet Union. In contrast to Andrić’s community, which, although bearing sacrifices throughout the construction process, shapes for itself a very modern or, it is safe to say, global multicultural identity, Kadare’s text clearly coins a distinct “native European” identity for Albania and puts forward its claim as the most ancient nation in the Balkans, with all influences perceived as foreign and as jeopardizing its cultural uniqueness. At the time of writing the novel, Kadare found himself in internal exile in the countryside, where he was sent to do physical work and forget his literary calling. In the province he was able to closely observe the effects of the “Albanian cultural revolution,” modeled upon that of Chairman Mao, in depleting the cultural fabric of the country, with its destruction of the historical legacy, communist inscriptions decorating mosques and churches, and old buildings razed to make space for ugly socialist buildings and bunkers.76 In apparent reaction against such rampant cultural barbarism, Kadare dedicated the decade of the 1970s to resuscitating the genre of the historical novel in Albania. One of the more problematic aspects of this revival is the increasingly present idea of the “Eternal Albania” in the nationalist imagination, which unites precommunist mythistorical ancestors with a very opaque critique of the communist eradication of traditional societal structures.77 It is this gesture that in the opinion of many of his critics transforms Kadare’s alleged anticommunism to nonrecognition. Thus, in sometimes long and tediously didactic paragraphs of The Three-Arched Bridge that extensively treat European linguistic derivations from the Albanian language, or in descriptions of the Ottoman enemy that flatten into clear Orientalist discourse, the narrative seems to be inclining toward soft chauvinism.78 Added to this are numerous derogatory references to “Slavs” and “Serbs,” as well as comments on the territorial and linguistic antecedence of Albanians in comparison with “Greeks.” Such a xenophobic denunciation of pretty much everybody is certainly a context that the dictator Enver Hoxha himself would have A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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appreciated.79 When Kadare’s Aesopian language is translated to describe the political rather than the racial or ethnic perspective, the cultural barbarism that the narrative reiterates as its main accusation against the Ottomans could just as well voice criticism of communist ideological upstarts, whose general project was the invention of the New Man and the eradication of millennia of tradition. Thus we arrive at the second and last of the obvious allegorical meanings of this novel. Kadare’s faithful transplantation of capitalist economic practices into a medieval background might seem like an unusual postmodern gimmick. However, if placed in the historical and ideological context in which the novel emerged, it seems that both the nationalist and the capitalist subtexts may be intended as a ruse to bypass censorship and possible persecution: “That other Albania had chiefly to constitute a defiance to the real Albania, the arid and gloomy Albania of communism. It would be a phantom, an eternal source of remorse, but also, and in spite of everything, a hope of resurrection.”80 The decade in which Kadare produced his “historical cycle,” which includes The Three-Arched Bridge, was also the one that saw the declining of the aging dictator’s power. As usually happens when an autocracy faces its own mortality, political repression becomes rampant, and Albania was no exception to this rule, with increasingly summary arrests, torture, and even executions occurring on a regular basis.81 This period also marks the peak of Albanian self-imposed isolationism, which turned the country into the last “European enigma.” Having broken all ties with the Soviets and the Chinese alike, due to their relatively reformatory socialist turns, Hoxha remained the last Stalinist still standing, declaring Albania the “only truly communist country” in the world. In such an environment, one productive way of staying afloat is to parrot official dogma, which in this case happened to be anticapitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric, as well as tirades against the concurrent “betrayal” of Albania in the economic sphere by both its powerful communist allies. Andrić’s and Kadare’s communities accommodate their bridges and remember sacrifices offered to them very differently. Soon after its construction, the bridge on the Drina becomes the defining locus of the developing town and plays a pivotal role in creating a particular identity of the growing community that exceeds ethnic and religious boundaries. Andrić’s small Bosnian town possesses an emphatically multiethnic and multiconfessional structure where, as in Bosnia and the Balkans in general, people cohabitate in relative peace. In that respect the town represents a community proper, devoid of any and all of the traits ascribed to chauvinist communalism. Instead of opposing each other, the members of the bridge community

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jointly oppose imperial impositions and repressive measures regardless of their provenance. The bridge is not only a silent witness, a sort of a “stone chronicle” of events and changes that affect the community, but is in fact the creative force behind the community, which owes its existence almost exclusively to the bridge. Kadare depicts the sacrifice as a brutal murder committed out of economic interest; little wonder that there is none of the affection for the bridge among these people that the Višegrad community shows. This particular bridge was forced upon an already existing ancient community, transplanting foreignness into the local traditions, creating social rupture, and threatening the community’s integrity. Indeed, from the beginning, the Ujana e Keqe bridge is associated solely with the evil that roads (and modernity) bring. Once its construction is complete, despite all the curses of the old woman Ajkuna and the subversions of the ferry company, the bridge remains unused for a long time.82 As soon as people start crossing the bridge, Uk, the ferryman, dies. Kujundžić argues that the “history of the bridge needs to be erased in order for the story to take place and vice versa.”83 In fact, it is the individual stories of people dying or being sacrificed for a collective enterprise that are erased before the flesh-eating bridge is able to start living its own (hi)story. A trace of prophecy is discernible in both texts: Andrić’s novel expresses it through the narrative tone of apprehension for the destiny of the bridge—the bridge in this case sharing the destiny of the community/ nation. With Kadare, however, the bridge facilitates the conquest of Albania, and its construction is considered as an evil omen. Ottomans cross the bridge in a skirmish that announces their sweeping conquests. The bridge is a metaphor for the Balkans/Albania at the time of the Ottoman threat: the Balkans/bridge are literally overrun by the Turks with some, but inadequate, resistance. And while the bridge-building enterprise is a direct cause of the population’s suffering in all the texts I discuss, it eventually assumes a liberatory role in Andrić’s narrative. Kadare’s novel, on the other hand, halts at the moment of the greatest tragedy for the Albanian nation. Any attempt at modernization is received with suspicion by traditional communities, and Kadare seems to agree with Fakinos that every such attempt encroaches further on the integrity of the national body, changing its spiritual essence at the same time. For that particular reason, their novels never romanticize sacrifice and, by analogy, show no sympathy for the structure raised on the sacrificed body. Kadare’s and Fakinos’s bridges symbolize not community construction but its demise, and as such they lose all positive attributes assigned to the legendary Balkan bridge, in which the immured woman’s milk continues to A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community

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nourish the community. Kadare insists that the sacrifice was a brutal murder committed out of economic and political interest, its victim a man cheated by a legal contract. This is the main reason why Kadare’s bridge never blends into the daily lives of the people but exists solely as an ominous reminder of a national tragedy. Fakinos perhaps takes his commentary furthest by having the creator of the bridge blow up his creation and leave its corpse as a warning to posterity. For Andrić and Kazantzakis the bridge-building enterprise is a bittersweet mixture of boon and negative transformations that afflict the community in which it is erected. Yet the very idea of building, of creating edifices, carries an unmitigated positive message. Creativity cannot be bridled, and it is the human urge to build new things in the face of horrific destruction and death that is ultimately celebrated. Even if it temporarily ceases in Andrić’s war-afflicted community, the construction of new visionary edifices probably continues in a less unhappy part of the world—or so at least his most memorable character at his hour of death prefers to believe. If Kazantzakis’s Master Builder leaves the tiny Greek village disgusted by his experience of loss and the people’s herd instinct, he will still continue to build somewhere else. As a “leader” of men, which is the role Karatani assigns to architects and builders, he will compulsively continue with his work. Kadare, on the other hand, concludes his novel in an almost equally negative tone as does Fakinos, whose contemporary narrator, having heard the lore of the bridge and its maker, reasons that it may still be too early to revive the ideals of Master Nikitas: “There has recently been the mention of a road and a bridge, but in view of the chaos of the events in Bosnia the idea has been abandoned. For now, it seems, it is still early for the masterbuilder’s dream.”84 And if this rather romantic dream of creating connections for the sake of better understanding among different communities is ever to be truly realized, it must originate with the people themselves, the result of their political maturity and their willingness to cooperate, rather than arrive as a visionary ideal or, even less so, as an imposition for the benefit of others.



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Chapter 3 The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

Even the most exclusive ethnoreligious, gender, or racial policies tend to demonstrate relative tolerance of inassimilable bodies at a time when the community experiences a period of peace or prosperity. However, the process of the establishment of authority in a community in crisis, or the (re)definition of the very concept of community, is the pivotal point that creates conditions in which violent exclusion of element(s) failing a full absorption by the uniform “common spirit” becomes the norm. As I discuss in the introduction, I define a crisis as any point in the existence of a community at which it increases calls for a greater collective unity, but also for a definition and defense of its cultural specificities and uniqueness. Due to the perception of an imminent threat (real or projected) to the preservation of values or the community’s very existence, a crisis is likewise the time of the reintroduction of “traditional” social norms (forgotten by new generations, thence the threat to community’s very sustenance), as well as of active social vigilantism, monitoring the imposition of discipline on the rest of the population. In psychoanalysis a crisis is conceptualized as the “traumatic kernel,” which is that part of any individual or collective experience that stands 79

outside of language and cognitive knowledge. It is also the segment of experience that cannot be theorized, historicized, or rationally comprehended and that survives in the domain of the metacognitive or emotional. Since it never undergoes the process of recognition, it carries the potential to return and cause more disturbance and trauma. The traumatic kernel is also that part of collective national history that is never really historicized and that continues to exist behind what frequently looks like a conspiracy of silence. Finally, the silence that surrounds historiographic accounts of such events may be caused no less by the trauma suffered by the individual subject/ community than by the trauma and horror inflicted on another by that same subject of history. In this chapter I discuss two novels that treat historical events as such traumatic kernels and constant reminders of the instability inherent in the Greek national identity. With recurrent episodes of conquests, ethnic cleansing, rape, and mass murder, the very core of the Greek historical narrative becomes an eternal repetition and accumulation of always already lived tragedies. The novels are situated in two specific historical periods that redefined Greek ethnoreligious communal mythology but also the country’s collective national, political, and social identity. These junctures are the period of liberation from Ottoman colonization in the nineteenth century and the expulsion of the Orthodox population from Turkey in 1922, or the “Asia Minor Catastrophe,” as Greek historiography commonly refers to it. Rhea Galanaki’s Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina nel cuore (1989) and Eugenia Fakinou’s The Seventh Garment (1983) are concerned with protagonists whose acceptance both by the community and by their own families is precluded on multiple counts at points of historical trauma and social transformation. Communal mythology in both texts originates in the law of the father’s name, which is not a given but rather a privilege that must be deserved. The father’s name, his law, and the right to inhabit a specific political space are necessary prerequisites for the individual’s identification with the entire community, but at the same time represent the organizational structure of the family as a microcosmic community. The family is foregrounded as the “truth of society—its organic, authentic form.”1 Moreover, in its role as the foundation and the model for a larger communal structure, the family treats its members to similar or identical mechanisms of subjection to communal laws and identification, as does the broader community. For this reason the uneasy subject whose integration with family-community defined in such restrictive terms is precluded chooses suicide as both the ultimate act of selferadication and also as a strategy that effectively undermines the exclusivity of the communal identity.

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Both novels employ myth as their narrative strategies, with variable levels of success. Galanaki’s Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina nel cuore comprises three parts—“Myth,” “History,” and “Epilogue.” “Myth” renders the events leading to the captivity of the protagonist, Emmanuel, as a boy and his subsequent life as an Ottoman subject in Egypt, through powerful dreamlike imagery. “History” conveys his homecoming (nostos), forced upon him by the military expedition that he, now under the name Ismail, undertakes as an Ottoman general on his native island of Crete, to quell the rebellion masterminded and financed by his own brother—the venture that ultimately leads to his death on the island. Finally, in “Epilogue,” which adds a metanarrative dimension, the epitaph on Emmanuel/Ismail’s tomb becomes emblematic as much of his interiorized otherness as of the systematic suppression in modern Greek history of the memory of the Greek Ottoman past. The narrative mode of “Myth” is in the third person and opens in a cave on the island of Crete, where local villagers find refuge from an Ottoman attack. Here, in the earth’s womb, Ismail, then still known by his Christian name of Emmanuel, undergoes a process of symbolic death and rebirth into somebody else. The cave scene is the site of his greatest psychological trauma, since he loses his whole family in the siege and from that moment spends his life in captivity, but it is also the episode that ultimately determines his life and death as well. It is in this cave that he acquires a knife that keeps him revolving within the “orbit of knives,” or inside a perpetual cycle of violence, and where he gets a glimpse of his own tragic end in the death of an Ottoman soldier. The memory of the Cretan cave and of his mother’s voice warning him not to stray away from her generates the ambiguity of his gender identity just as much as of his national/religious one. Because of his feeling that his place was among the men fighting outside (and getting killed) rather than with the infirm and the women inside, every recollection of the event of his capture is forever tinged with a dose of shame about the duty he failed to fulfill as a man. Throughout his Ottoman existence the figure of his father is curiously absent from his memory. Apart from the distinctly phallic symbol of the rusted blade that he holds close to his body, and that keeps him in an endless cycle of military engagement and violence, references to his father are for the most part missing. His subjectivity precariously wavers in the space delineated by several powerful men who surround him and who determine the course of his life, all along permeated by the memory of his mother and the events in the cave. Upon his return to Crete and his family house, his father’s ghost finally appears to him, but only to chastise him for the dishonor he brought upon the family and to demand proof that Ismail is deserving of again carrying his family name. Overwhelmed by shame, guilt, The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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and the demands put before him, Ismail/Emmanuel commits suicide in his parents’ house. On the surface, the novel seems founded upon the juxtaposition of opposites and binary relations.2 Such is, for example, Ismail’s relationship with his parents, in which the memory of his loving mother is antithetical to that of the authoritative father; his relationship with his brother, particularly with respect to the glaring difference in their destinies, which only further emphasizes the fact that they both set off from the identical juncture of Ottoman captivity; the ambiguity of his shared life with his “step-brother” and friend Ibrahim, which frequently borders on the homoerotic and only further contributes to his anxiety. Ultimately, but not before Ismail’s character and existence undergo the scrutiny of his familial setting, these modalities that resist a precise definition lead to a seemingly irresolvable tension between his double/conflicting identity as a Greek-born Ottoman subject—between his birth identity and his assumed Ottoman self. Moreover, this apparently untenable duality of Ismail’s character is frequently complicated by further ambiguities in his already complex identity crisis. For example, his Ottoman subjectivity is realized in Ottoman Egypt, rather than in Istanbul; his Cretan origin is juxtaposed with the “proper” Greekness of mainland Greece, from which he is always separated by the sea, a constant reminder of his native culture’s physical proximity and his own isolation. On a more manifest level, this duality resides in the novel’s division into “mythical” and “historical” narratives, with apparently conflicting and mutually undermining tendencies. The novel’s subtitle, spina nel cuore (thorn in the heart), refers to the rebellious island of Crete as a “thorn in the side of Venice,” which, given in the Italian original, stands in direct opposition to the Islamic name of the novel’s protagonist. This Italian derivation of Galanaki’s subtitle on the surface reinforces the split of the protagonist’s being between his Oriental and Occidental personae. His self-sacrifice becomes imminent once he returns under the auspices of his “own” father’s law and his original Greek identity, as he is unable to adequately respond to his native culture’s aggressive homogeneity—a result of the identity politics of an emerging nation in the course of a liberation struggle. Eugenia Fakinou’s The Seventh Garment (1983) is a relatively short novel with a surprisingly complicated structure consisting of multiple narrators and numerous events, while its many protagonists with identical names can sometimes lead to confusion. The novel is comprised of alternating internal monologues of several female family members and that of a Tree, whose soliloquy frames the structure of the text. Mana, her daughter Eleni, and her granddaughter Roula are the three narrators who spin the mythistorical

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narrative that encompasses 150 years of recent Greek history and involves no fewer than seven generations of the family. Uranian and Christian mythologies provide a subtext for individual and collective tragedies caused by historical events, which all ultimately converge at the site of a deeply suppressed family secret. Roughly summarized, the narrative follows Roula, a contemporary Athenian woman completely alienated from her rural family, whom she has never even met. Roula receives a letter from her unknown grandmother addressed to her mother, Archontoula, in which Mana, the grandmother, pleads with her daughter to attend to her dying brother Fotos in their village. Realizing that the family has never learned of her mother’s death, Roula hesitantly decides to attend to family business on her behalf. She thus embarks on a “voyage of discovery” to the little village symbolically named Rizes (“roots”), a place located off marked roads, in order to fulfill the promise she gave to her dying mother that she would attend her uncle’s funeral whenever summoned. Meanwhile, in Rizes, the family is getting ready to carry out pagan funeral rites, which require that ritual flamboura be covered with the garments of firstborn male ancestors to guarantee the safe passage of the dying man to the other side.3 When one of the garments in the collection mysteriously goes missing, Mana, the matriarch of the family, performs a self-sacrifice and offers her bloody garment in place of the missing one, thus enabling her son to join the ancestral spirits. Through this sacrificial inscription in the family lineage, Mana, an Asia Minor refugee from the Greek “Catastrophe” of 1922 and a village outcast, finally acquires a place in the family of her “man,” Demos, who, although he fathered all seven of Mana’s children by repetitively raping her, would never recognize any of her offspring as his own.4 Upon arrival at the village, Roula learns that her mother, Archontoula, left her family after an attempted rape by her own father, Demos, for which he was murdered by the now-dying uncle Fotos. Fotos cannot depart until he finds out whether he arrived in time to prevent the rape, so his sister is the only one who can relieve his conscience and allow him to die. This is the debt that Archontoula owed to her brother and the legacy that her daughter, Roula, has to pay tribute to by attending her uncle’s funeral. The Seventh Garment was published in the years following the fall of the Greek military junta dictatorship in 1974, at the time of Greece’s reemergence into full European membership as a newly restored democracy. It was a time of the nation’s attempts to reinvent itself yet again after a succession of nondemocratic developments and to reestablish the severed links to its European origin. After decades of political division, whose unsuccessful resolution led first to civil war and ultimately to military dictatorship, union with The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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Europe presented a chance for this internal disjuncture to be put to rest—if not to actually be forgotten. This is the Greece of Fakinou’s novel, a complex multivocal narrative in which several female protagonists tell stories rich in mythical and mystical symbolism but that also abounds in references to the Greek political situation when the country was on the cusp of joining the European community. The novel’s mythistorical context and its abundance of mythical references are of interest for several reasons: one is the issue of the female presence in myth, or as some have argued, the “enslavement” of women in myth; another is the appropriation of the Demeter-Persephone myth in the narrative, which allegorizes several of the most acute foci of Greek national history; last but not least is the fact that it allows for incursion of and conquest by the female voice of the privileged space of public speech, the right to speak/narrate (genealogical as well as national history), and through this the access of female speakers/protagonists to the testamentary rights of the patriarchal legacy.

The Father’s Testament Is His Name At the point at which Ismail/Emmanuel revisits his origin, he is forced to disassociate his two identities from each other and choose between them. Therefore, the resolution of Emmanuel/Ismail’s ambiguous position as a doubly subjectivized individual takes place only during the homecoming visit to his birth house, when he discovers that the space has overgrown his stature: “the door I leaned against had grown taller, while I had shrunk to the size of a child.”5 However, this homecoming scene represents not merely a reversal between the identity that was forced upon him in captivity and his “original” self, but more so a synthesis between his two parallel and mutually exclusive selves. This explains why in the act of the delirious sacrificial spilling of blood in his parental house, Ismail summons the ghosts of his entire family and joins them to those of the people who defined his Ottoman reality. As a token of reconciliation with his past and present existence, Ismail/ Emmanuel buries the rusty knife he found in the cave on that fateful day and thus breaks the vicious cycle of violence that indelibly marked his life. His father’s absence from his memory is obviously caused by his own feeling of shame for not having been killed with the rest of the male population but instead hiding in the cave with the women and the infirm. In contrast to his father’s acknowledgment, contingent on Ismail’s national and religious loyalty, his mother’s love seems unconditional. However, her frequent appearance in his mind deeply disturbs his routine and is in fact instrumental in bringing the prodigal son back to his father. The cave scene marks the inception site of Ismail/Emmanuel’s problematic double identity,

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as well as the emergence of his other multiple anxieties in the two identities he will be forced to negotiate. His refusal to stay with his mother, and the subsequent acquisition of a knife that will keep him revolving within the “orbit of knives” for the rest of his life, indicates his transposition into an Ottoman existence or his second subjectivation and the creation of a conflicting selfhood. This is the frame in which his persona will continue to exist, wavering between two opposites but forever escaping full identification with either of them. Ismail’s memory of his first life in Crete intervenes with his military career in Egypt and impedes his full integration into the symbolic law of his new Ottoman identity.6 His second life thus becomes a traumatic space between his symbolic death and his actual death, which is persistently disrupted by the memory of his mother warning him not to stray away from her. His mother’s memory assumes the role of a subversive principle, whose sole function seems to be to prevent his settling into his new existence by constantly reminding him of his transgression against the father’s law. Ismail’s self-sacrifice appears as the unavoidable outcome of the pressures exerted upon him by his two interpellating systems, whose strict and mutually antagonistic cultural delineations pronounce his twofold character unsustainable. Perhaps the concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic may prove useful in understanding the dynamics of compulsion that led to Ismail’s desubjectivation and sacrifice. Semiotic chora, or the existence of unarticulated nonlinguistic elements that underlie the regulated order of the symbolic, or the Father’s Law, commonly identified with the social order, does not stand in dialectical opposition to the concept of the symbolic but instead recognizes their mutual interference, as well as the persistence of traces of one in the other. This irrepressible interconnectedness of the semiotic and the symbolic persists in the position of the subject as well: “the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both.”7 Although the Lacanian understanding of the subject requires the abolition of the semiotic on the threshold of the symbolic, which in the future exists as a fantasy of the child/mother bond that never really was, Kristeva’s corrective instead insists that the semiotic persists in the symbolic, albeit suppressed. It seems that it not only reemerges in crisis but also acts as a lifeline, some kind of a saving lie for the wavering subject: “the unsettled and questionable subject . . . maintains itself at the cost of reactivating this repressed instinctual, maternal element.”8 The semiotic thus does not stand in a position of confrontation with the symbolic, but quite the opposite: it is an agent in the service of the symbolic. Ismail’s The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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recurrent memory of his mother and her love does not take him into a fantasy that exists outside his duty as an ethnic or religious subject but in fact brings him closer to it, by continuously interrupting any possibility of harmonious integration with his second, Ottoman life. The idyll of family home is synonymous with the coercive strategies of the symbolic and therefore the communal norm. Moderately subversive attributes assigned to the semiotic principle emerge as disruptive of patriarchal laws, but in this case only of those laws that comprise Ismail’s alien identity. The semiotic principle, however, is surprisingly complicit with the laws of his original identity and constantly acts as a reminder of where his true loyalties should lie. Freud invites us to rethink this coercive familial milieu through the father-son relationship. No authority (and repression) can measure up to the authority (and repression) imposed on the son by the dead and absent father, this less than benevolent supervisor, who punishes dissent by exclusion. And it is precisely the memory of his father that Ismail is never able to summon in his reveries, yet whose approval of the metamorphosis of his cultural being he actively seeks. The family name, the Greek language, ethnic consciousness, and the Orthodox religion, among others, are the values that his father represents. As sites of identification they are part of the process of Ismail’s first subjectivation and are in active competition with his second identity. The acknowledgment of the rightful bearer of the father’s legacy by the conferral of the father’s name has been at the very core of civilization and the perpetuation of memory, hand in hand with the preservation of relics and biological reproduction through male progeny.9 Judith Butler rejects the merely representative function of the name and instead endows it with the capacity of establishing patriarchal social laws. Baptism, or the conferral of a proper name on an individual who is through the patronym already halfway to full membership in the community, completes the process of “fixing” the subject, in the form of a “rigid designator”: the “scene of baptism, which will retroactively become the model for all naming as rigid designation, is the fixing of a referent to a person through the interpellation of that person into a religious lineage, a ‘naming’ that is at once an inculcation into a patrilineage that traces back to, and reiterates, the original naming that God the father performs on Adam. The ‘fixing’ of the referent is thus a ‘citation’ of an original fixing, a reiteration of the divine process of naming, whereby naming the son inaugurates his existence within the divinely sanctioned community of man.”10 Naming thus not only is pivotal to the politics of hereditary transference and the creation of rights and memory within a family and a community— the privilege of testamentary legacy—but also is found at the very basis of the

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process of subjectivation; it is both an obligation and a grave imposition.11 Answering the call of the dead father always means identifying oneself as responsive and responsible before the big Other; it thus becomes the ultimate evidence of this repressive and “criminal act,” as Tatjana Rosić calls it, in which the “ghost of the excluded or forbidden, therefore murdered, never stops haunting the ‘legitimate’ subject.”12 For this reason, interpellation, the call of the big Other and the self-identification (of the son) as the one who is summoned, can operate outside the subject’s willing acknowledgment of the process. The individual, Butler suggests, “need not know about or register a way of being constituted for that constitution to work in an efficacious way.”13 Such coercion-induced unconscious subjection to the law implies that the subject internalizes the law and duly responds to interpellation by the big Other even if he is fully incognizant of its existence. When during his visit to the parental house his father’s spirit finally speaks to him, Ismail has to seek permission from his dead father to once again carry his name. His father’s indignation at his son’s “betrayal” of his family name and ancestral religion is manifest in his spirit’s refusal to acknowledge him through communication. So when he first addresses Ismail, the father invokes Ismail’s Christian name in a hymn he sings to him: “He no longer knew how to address me, by my Christian or my Muslim name; which was the reason he chose to chant that hymn, continuing to call me inwardly by my Christian name.”14 Perhaps the most compelling illustration of this unquestioning and irrational responsiveness to the most outrageous demands posed by the big Other is the biblical story of the sacrifice of son by father at an explicit command given by God. Derrida investigates the ethics of the father’s unconditional submission to the request for his son’s murder as the ultimate example of responsibility to the big Other and utter blindness regarding responsibility to others (including himself and his son/victim).15 Through his immediate answerability to the call of the big Other’s authority, the father demonstrates his uncritical and irrevocable dedication to the exclusivity of the big Other (his own big Other) over all other duties, including the love he owes to his own son. His responsibility to his son is not dispensable or nonexistent; in fact, it cannot even be questioned, because in the hierarchy of responsibilities it can only be subjected to the call of the abstract idea of the big Other (God, nation, religion): “[Abraham] acts as if he were discharged of his duty to his fellows, his son, and humankind; but he continues to love them. He must love them and also owe them everything in order to be able to sacrifice them. Without being so, then, he nevertheless feels absolved of his duty towards his family, towards the human species [le genre humain] and the generality of the ethical, absolved by the absolute of a unique duty that binds The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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him to God the one. Absolute duty absolves him of every debt and releases him from every duty.”16 Ismail’s father obliges his son to the same unquestioning obedience to the law that he himself demonstrates. If his memory is absent from Ismail’s reminiscences, it is not due to lack of love or dedication to his son and family on the father’s part, but because the father cannot satisfy this imperative duty to the law in any other way but by abandoning sentimentality regarding the reasons for his son’s transgression. In order to claim his right to be his father’s son, Ismail must accept the same kind of selfless existence and responsibility to this imperative. Here lies the foundation of the sacrificial logic, which has nothing logical about it: it is as obliging as its call is irresistible. In order to be recognized by his father, Emmanuel/Ismail would have to reject the otherness of his Ottoman existence and feel genuine remorse for the reprehensible life he has been leading. The father reclaims the prodigal son for himself, his religion, and his nation. Ismail thus reenters the metamorphosed symbolic that Kristeva defines as “a social effect of the relation to the big Other, established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures.”17 His father’s hand stretched out to him, in a gesture reminiscent of Michelangelo’s God granting Adam the gift of life, is a second (and final) subjectivation (and rebirth) for Ismail that can only lead to his death. This gift restores his original identity, fully circumscribed by religion, ethnicity, and family. His father’s recognition sanctions Ismail to be rightfully reestablished among the “family trinity”—father, mother, and brother—who is the subject of his memories while in Egypt but whom he could never join while suspended in his Islamic exile: “He had not wished to know me as an Ottoman in Egypt, but had waited for me to turn into a child again, to step into the old house, before he could envisage me as a person, even if it had to be as a person who had failed to embrace and forward his guiding choices. He had been waiting to see those tears in my eyes,” says Ismail/Emmanuel.18 Galanaki’s novel is thoroughly pervaded by what Anne McClintock recognizes as the “Western metaphor of the nation as a family” and the “naturalness of nationalism as a domestic genealogy.”19 Ismail’s anxiety to reestablish himself as a family member/child coincides with the rediscovery of his Greek origin; his “redemption” and rejoining of the Greek nation are primarily but not solely dependent on his father’s acceptance. The nostos episode should be read as an attempt at rehabilitating Ismail both as a national subject and as his father’s (male) offspring. Athanasia Sourbati proposes that The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, unlike historical novels in general, which regularly serve “as a vehicle” for the

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“discourse of nationalism,” in fact incorporates the strategies of “historiographic metafiction” with the aim of “exploring an analogue for a contemporary version of the individual, not as a monosemantic entity defined by nationalistic classification, but as a site of contradiction.”20 This novel about a religious convert from the past reveals the impact of historical events on modern Greek identity as much as on the protagonist’s individual one. All the trials and tribulations of Ismail/Emmanuel incite collective national selfinterrogation and uncover the nonviability of pure and monolithic entities and identities. Modern Greek identity, the way Galanaki’s novel defines it, does not correspond to an idealized Eurocentric invention but, more like that of Emmanuel/Ismail himself, to a distinct mixture of Oriental and Western historical, cultural, and demographic influences. Ismail acknowledges the existence of this contradiction in himself, this “stranger in himself,” when in the homecoming scene he finally connects his feeling of being a member of his father’s family and the Greek nation to the irreversible fact of his Islamization. Even though, we could argue, this “doubleness” would be acceptable to Ismail himself, he is only able to identify the source of the anxiety he has felt all his life once he learns about his brother’s survival and, moreover, his activities as part of the resistance intelligentsia in the Greek liberation movement. It is then that his original identity, which was forcefully repressed, reappears and begins to haunt him as a feeling of shame, exclusion, and underachievement in comparison with his brother and in the face of his father and the Greek nation. While Freud defines the concept of the uncanny in relation to one’s own psyche, to the “foreignness” and the schizophrenic divisions inside one’s own unconscious, Kristeva takes the meaning a step further to define the foreignness of the body/subject that finds itself within a monolithically imagined community and is alienated by its own otherness: “a foreigner seldom arouses the terrifying anguish provoked by death, the female sex, or the ‘baleful’ unbridled drive. Are we nevertheless so sure that the ‘political’ feelings of xenophobia do not include, often unconsciously, that agony of frightened joyfulness that has been called unheimlich, that in English is uncanny, and that the Greeks quite simply call xenos ‘foreign’?”21 In recognizing and detesting the other as an external threat to one’s integrity, one only acknowledges one’s own eternal and seemingly irreconcilable split. The other is part of oneself, but it is that part that becomes reprehensible when it prevails and assumes control of one’s being and, as Žižek points out, “prevents us from achieving full identity with ourselves.”22 This disturbing other merely embodies the fear of that internal threat. It has to be sacrificed, banished, destroyed, as the ultimate reminder of one’s own unacceptable misbalance. Yet by accepting the truth of this split into what an The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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individual recognizes as her own and the stranger, one may be able to accept the stranger as an equal. Kristeva concludes: “To discover our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront that ‘demon,’ that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper solid ‘us.’ By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.”23

Masculinity and Communal Identity One of the aspects of “belonging” to the family/community/nation that Emmanuel/Ismail fails and is subsequently required to prove in the homecoming scene is his masculinity, tainted by the long years spent in captivity and basically shadowing the military campaigns of his “adopted brother” Ibrahim and of his powerful father. Both this fact and his long-lasting shame for hiding in the cave as a child during the campaign that spelled his doom identify Ismail as alien to his familial and cultural heritage. Ismail’s life in Egypt abounds with references pointing to his inconclusive gender and religious/national character, in which he for the most part acts from a very different position. His gender ambivalence is most strongly accentuated alongside other male protagonists, yet Ismail’s subconscious unmistakably sends signals in situations where his manhood seems to be questioned, when he is quick to “make sure the rusty blade from the cave [is] still there” and his loyalty to the father unwavering.24 The text exhibits a curious absence of female characters—the only one ever mentioned is his mother—while abounding in the vocabulary of an almost exclusively masculine domain—the military, war, aggression, murder, conquest, and politics. In fact, woman is the abject that Ismail abandons at the very beginning of the novel, and for the rest of the narrative his search is dedicated to the transposition from the symbolic realm imposed upon him to the one he believes is naturally his. His wandering through the anxiety of gender identifiers is very reminiscent of “gender melancholy,” which Butler recognizes in the abandoning of the male subject’s homosexual self due to the conforming pressure of cultural coercion. Freud describes this social dimension of the ego, as well as the mechanism for instilling guilt over one’s homosexual libido, in the essay “On Narcissism.” What Freud defines as the “ego ideal,” or the norms of social propriety, is likewise interested in controlling and targeting any departures from heterosexual normativity as “perverse” and thus instrumental in inducing various forms of social anxiety: “This ideal has a social side: it is also the common ideal of a family, a class, or a nation. It binds not only the narcissistic libido,

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but also a considerable amount of his homosexual libido, which in this way becomes turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction that arises from the non-fulfillment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido, is transformed into a sense of guilt and this is social anxiety.”25 Ambivalences of Ismail’s character that can be attributed to the uncertainties of his masculinity represent the source of Ismail’s “double identity crisis,” as both his national/religious and his gender identities seem deficient when compared to the other male figures in the text.26 His gender ambiguity is most acutely emphasized in comparison to the authoritative male figures whose influence dictates his life—the unforgiving memory of his father, his “step brother” Ibrahim, and his blood brother Antonis. The emphatically virile figures of these men who define his life, all of whom have a proven record of military or diplomatic activities, even more compellingly urge Ismail to prove his masculinity. Most important, however, by losing his homeland Ismail by extension loses his allegiance to the kind of masculine identity that the father figure epitomizes. He is aware that the cave episode jeopardizes not only his national and religious but also his gender/sexual identity. His multifarious anxiety is clearly demonstrated in his reconciliation with his father, in which the parent forgives him for what he has become: “I accept you, though I had great trouble arriving at that decision. . . . I want you to know that I would rather be slaughtered again than dishonoured.”27 The father speaks in terms of honor and of his son “dishonoring” him, his house, and his name, using a term that is commonly used for female children who “shame” their kin. It is clear from this imaginary dialogue between Ismail and his father’s ghost that it is not merely his religious allegiance that is being interrogated here but also his masculinity. In that sense, the events that ensue during his fateful visit to the parental house point to Ismail’s attempt to internally reconcile his two conflicting realities. The dead father has reclaimed and renamed his son and thus confirmed his authority and “ownership” over his own blood. Why is it that only by “acknowledging” someone formally, by giving him the name, his own name, does the father establish the right (of ownership) over his son, the right that overrides loyalty, blood relations, and genetics? Could the reason for such demonstrated instability of this position of the son/father/man, as well as his constant requests for ever-new proofs of legitimation that weigh much more than the natural relations themselves, be the suspicion that has forever plagued fatherhood in the matter of the origin of offspring?28 The father and the son who is his father’s heir are both carriers of this potentially subversive knowledge that undermines the very principle of patrilineal hereditary rights. Derrida very briefly contemplates the possibility that the sacrifice of Isaac The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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by his own father upon the explicit order of the big Other/God could take a different turn should woman, any woman, as much as gain knowledge of the act that Abraham in blind obedience agrees to commit: “Would the logic of sacrificial responsibility within the implacable universality of the law, of its law, be altered, inflected, attenuated, or displaced, if a woman were to intervene in some consequential manner? Does the system of this sacrificial responsibility and of the double ‘gift of death’ imply at its very basis an exclusion or sacrifice of woman? . . . In the case of the tragic hero or the tragic sacrifice, however, woman is present, her place is central.”29 Unfortunately, this is where Derrida halts this investigation, never to resume it in this text. The issue that his question raises yet the text never explains is precisely what Galanaki’s novel likewise refuses to resolve: Is there any other significance to the memory of Ismail’s mother, save for being an agent of the symbolic and forcing Ismail back to his father’s embrace? Is Ismail haunted by the lingering spirit of his first attachment, his own feminine self, or the bliss of belonging in total oblivion that this loyalty is so easily lost yet hard to earn? What exactly is the role of the mother’s centrality in the text, as well as in the totality of the sacrificial structure? Here again we encounter the question of the meaning of the female victim and her significance that we have been tracing from the beginning: is she always the first and ultimate victim, as the bulk of the feminist criticism holds, since she is also symbolic of the multiple marginalities implied by gender/racial/ethnic/social difference? Save for the significant presence of his mother in Ismail’s memory, the novel is generated solely by dynamics among men, where Ismail maintains a very precarious balance within this almost exclusively patriarchal universe. Ismail is the pivotal subject-object that epitomizes the construction of the core of Greekness. Alongside the lines of the definition of masculinity as an aspect of socially significant behavior, the key to the problematic of identity formation in the text lies in the fact that gender is an equally coercive part of one’s identity as are other subjectivating criteria. It is not located only at the level of interpersonal social relations and perceptions; instead, gender lies at the very foundation of the subjectivation process. As I have already discussed above, much deconstructivist feminist writing approaches gender as well as sex not as a natural but as a socially constituted or discursive category and thus an artificial one.30 Masculinity assumes the position of the identity norm to which the individual seeking access to social partnership must necessarily conform. As Butler writes on the subject: “Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex . . . gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex

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is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”31 Emmanuel’s mother and the entire symbolic field that she stands for clearly represent the first victim that cultural compulsion, his big Other, puts before him. This victim becomes transformed into the “ungrieved” and unaccounted loss of the woman (in himself) that Ismail must fully repudiate from his unconscious memory if he is to form the communal attachments expected of him. Ultimately, in the sphere of social morality this compulsory repression is generally understood as what Butler calls “ideals of social rectitude,” which are frequently, if not exclusively, “defined over and against homosexuality.”32 Ismail’s gender identity is heavily dependent on the ways in which his two homelands define each other and one against the other: how the Greeks create their (European, masculine) identity with respect to the nonEuropean Ottomans but also how they defer any possibility of a reversal of gendered signifiers due to the long colonial history and the binary perspective in which this history places them.33 In most of his reminiscences of Ibrahim, Ismail utilizes the discourse of female love and emotions, full of overtly sexual connotations: “Ibrahim came, beautiful as I remembered and loved him, and sat on the ground by my side. He put his arm around my shoulders, his eyes fixed on the monastery. And I hated him then, for the first time and with my whole being, for he had never cared to look upon the autumn of my past, whereas I had devoted myself to him entirely. . . . I hated this man, the son of a great sovereign, who had pretended to love me.”34 Like a faithful and unfulfilled wife, Ismail projects his own ambitions and disappointments on Ibrahim and shares in his grief after Ibrahim suffers the indignity of having to subject himself to the sultan’s authority despite his military victories. Following Ibrahim’s death, Ismail marries “according to his station, thus sweetening his grief over the loss of his beloved friend,” entering the social bond in which “other women would now be taking care of him.”35 However, the most emphatic evidence of Ismail’s fluctuating gender identity comes into the spotlight in his relationship with his blood brother, Antonis. Unlike himself and through mechanisms unknown to Ismail, Antonis succeeded in escaping Ottoman captivity and becoming one of the leading figures of the Greek nationalist revival and liberation movement. Both boys are taken captive after the cave siege and then separated—Antonis is sent to Istanbul and Ismail to Egypt. The point of their separation is the last time the novel treats them as equal in their gender ambiguity, originating from the fear the two children feel at the uncertainty of what lies ahead of them: “their hands and bodies touched. They both felt that at such a time there was The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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no room for the strict upbringing that forbade any show of mutual tenderness between men, even ‘little’ men. They never spoke a word, their bodies clinging to each other in unbroken silence—as if words might have stifled the secret fount of tenderness, that sudden, desperate tenderness that made a brother’s cheek feel as soft as a mother’s and caused the sweat of the forced march to smell of milk.”36 Upon “refinding” his brother, the event that activates repressed recollections and anxieties, the Greek language Ismail was “fearing” resurfaces, and he begins a correspondence with Antonis. His letters convey the pain and buried emotions they felt for each other as children at the same time as they reveal the sexual confusion that defines Ismail’s relationship to Ibrahim. Similar to the manner in which the masculinity of Ismail’s Ottoman counterparts (Ibrahim and his father, Mohammad Ali) prevails over his own sexual indeterminacy, Antonis’s masculinity comes to the forefront when placed side by side with Ismail’s (feminized) passivity. Even though the brothers are given (or rather denied) identical opportunities and begin their new lives as captive children, they have very different destinies. We are to deduce that the relationship between them will lead to this kind of ambiguity from the parting that they take from one another in the opening scenes of the novel: on the point of separation Antonis asks his brother to speak his name, “Antonis Kambanis Papadakis, son of Franghios.” Unlike Emmanuel, whose name is not heard on this occasion, Antonis never really leaves his father’s orbit, and his subsequent career appears to be consistent with the ideals of Greek national and religious determination. Although the reader never learns through what channels Antonis achieves his current status, he appears to have never jeopardized his loyalty to his father and his people. When, therefore, toward the end of the novel the two brothers “meet” again, they find each other in entirely different circumstances. While Ismail remains a captive practically all his life, Antonis manages not only to emancipate himself from Ottoman captivity but also to become a major benefactor of the Cretan liberation movement in Athens. Such a development clearly exculpates Antonis and makes him acceptable again in his father’s eyes (something that Ismail only reluctantly accomplishes in the homecoming scene) but also incontestably defines Antonis as yet another of Ismail’s gender opposites. Ismail’s anxiety and guilt represent an insurmountable impediment to his full integration, and his self-sacrifice/suicide should be interpreted from this point. With Ismail unable to live up to the ideal required by his community, and his family and father as its primary agents, yet equally incapable of ignoring this ideal, his interiorization of the conflict is practically the only choice given him by the existing social exigencies: “the aggression towards the ideal and its unfulfillability is turned inward, and

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this self-aggression becomes the primary structure of conscience: ‘by means of identification [the child] takes the unattackable authority into himself.’”37 Ismail’s indecisiveness and uncertainty about important issues clearly reflect the discursive representation of his fluctuating and undetermined identity. At times it seems that all his self-interrogation and contemplation is an excuse not to act and that he embraces a fatalist vision of life. This positions him in sharp contrast to Antonis, who, although we are not privy to his internal interrogations as we are to Ismail’s, never seems to doubt the course of action he embarked upon and who fully epitomizes Western confidence in human agency. For his part, Ismail prefers to interpret the stark difference in their situations as a matter of luck, whereby “Antonis had been placed by chance on the right side, a side fully vindicated by patriotic ideals. He was further privileged to find himself in Athens, where he would not have to witness the daily betrayal of those ideals.”38 By setting the brothers in such opposition to each other, the novel exposes numerous undefined and indefinable identity concepts that purportedly represent sharp distinctions between the national and religious essences of the two cultures. Gendered discourse is part of the hegemonic rhetoric of the colonizer, through which the agency of the subjected is not simply doubted but dismissed as nonexistent. This discursive economy defines the colonizer or aggressor as the male, the one who ultimately defines and controls reality by the sheer power of his gaze. The West has utilized this power as one of its discursive weapons in relation to various geographical loci under its colonial influence. In this imbalance of power the defining male gaze directed at the other unmistakably reproduces it as the female.39 In the Greek-Ottoman relation, however, this binary is far more complex. The site of “masculinity” that the Greek national imaginary claims for itself within Eurocentric rhetoric is in turn undermined by the fact of the Greek subjugation to the Ottoman colonizer, which is in another discursive reversal non-European and thus “feminized.”

How Large Is the Women ’s Space ? In sharp contrast to the suggestive absence of female protagonists in Galanaki’s novel, The Seventh Garment shows almost an overabundance of women; yet this does not mean that the novel indulges in the creation of a rather improbable universe fundamentally rid of the patriarchal grip over its every aspect. Quite the opposite seems to be the case, for in the very limited critical engagement the novel has invited, most voices denounce it for relegating women to the back corners of myth while reserving the heroic center stage for their male counterparts. Some others, on the contrary, choose to regard The Seventh Garment as Fakinou’s contribution to the worldwide The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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offensive of contemporary historical narratives by women in their efforts to “repossess historical experience.”40 The narrative appears as a twofold inscription of women into the patriarchal text: on the one hand, it proffers a revision of the past that allows for the joining of women’s history to mainstream history, of “placing women’s history in history”; on the other hand, it proposes a concurrent reclamation of agency for the feminine in the mythical realm.41 Ownership of the story, the right to speak and narrate in public space, is what defines advantage in the political as well as the gender arena. If we agree that Fakinou’s novel in fact extends the limits of women’s space rather than simply confining the female protagonists within it, this strategy neither entails a genuine abrogation of the patriarchal myth (both ancient and Christian) for the sake of women nor demonstrates interest in too easily created female utopias feeding off the fantasy of the existence of a parallel and separate female history and language. Instead, what this novel accomplishes may be viewed within the trajectories of limited advancements that expand public space in order to allow women a claim over language, narration, and historical legacy. Among explicit strategies that Fakinou employs in order to extricate women from the limitations of the patriarchal myth is the situation of her narrative in the distinct space of pre-Olympian and pre-Homeric mythology. Although in no way anti- or unpatriarchal—and itself already a substitution for an anterior goddess-oriented worship—this Uranian mythological cosmogony nevertheless preserves some characteristic remnants of ancient beliefs linked to the matrilineal genealogy of the universe, which leaves more maneuvering space to women than the later Olympian pantheon.42 Furthermore, the novel does not interpret men as antagonistic to women’s integrity, and most of the founding relationships in the novel are good and solid bonds based on love. Fakinou’s women live within the very strict boundaries of male history, which is their current inescapable reality, but inside that existence they nevertheless reserve a very distinct and recognizable space for their own affirmation. What Fakinou’s text proposes, therefore, is not a revolutionary breach through the confinements of the patriarchal discourse, but instead a fundamental healing of history—first by acknowledging women’s role in history and then by building a firm connection between the female and male worlds—closing the rupture created by historic events. It is impossible not to remark that in this respect the novel profoundly reflects the sociopolitical developments characteristic of Greece in the early 1980s, when the country was plagued by political and ideological divisions and the recently ended dictatorship. The novel’s structure is circumscribed by the voice of the oak tree—one of the many references to pre-Homeric and primordial European nature

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worship—which identifies women as not only the creators of everything living but also as the authors of history: “I love women. Women and wild flowers. I love the colours of wild flowers. White, yellow and purple. These are the colours of the land. . . . Women are suffering greatly again. It is women who write History. They carry the world’s great events on their shoulders.”43 Despite allowing women the grace of creation, the Tree’s monologue forms the boundaries of their discursive space. Athanasia Sourbati identifies this limitation as a “phallic enclosure” that defines the narrative inhibition of the female subtext. Her argument leads her to relegate the narrative with all its protagonists to the service of the preservation of a patriarchal “myth of woman, which needs to be fed on the female blood of rape, childbirth, and virginity.”44 One of the problems with this reading lies in the fact that almost all the men in the novel are in fact “present absences” in a world in which women are left to fend for themselves. The men are for the most part missing or dead and are only remembered in women’s stories. When evoked, some appear in women’s dreams, but always decapitated—an obvious referent for castration and literal disempowerment, as well as the collapse of men’s traditional role as protectors of womenfolk.45 Others are rendered worthless or reduced to rapists who take revenge on other men by ruining “their” women. I cautiously consider this strategy as a clearing gesture for the creation of a space for female agency that is free of men. This does not in any way loosen the hold that patriarchy has over women; instead it continues to loom as the imperative perpetuated by the womenfolk themselves but within which they also make efforts to establish their own social and historical agency. One level of the text reveals a rather transparent identification of the protagonists with mythological personages. On another, more subtle level, pagan rituals and mythical narratives blend with Christian elements to create a unique setting that will be recognized as women’s territory. It is here that women’s primeval link with the supernatural runs as an undercurrent through the text. Women’s recourse to magic is thus seen as an alternative to their social subjugation. Magic is one of the few liberatory strategies allowed to women within patriarchal confines and is the sole realm over which they exert full control. Indeed, we can argue that the only recourse they have within this strict division into male and female social spheres is the undefined space of the ritual, the unconscious (dreams), and magic. Women’s dreams, for example, foreshadow all the major events in the novel—the brute Demos raping his daughter Archontoula, her brother Fotos killing their father, little Persephone’s disappearance, Mana’s letter to Archontoula asking her to visit her dying brother. Yet for all their visionary power, the women are helpless to prevent any of the events from taking place. The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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The Female Body inside the Greek National Paradigm A rather transparent analogy between the novel’s mythical subtext and the social reality to which this subtext frequently refers represents the narrative’s main weakness. The rendition of the Demeter-Persephone myth in the novel—the mysterious disappearance of Mana’s daughter Persephone during the attack on the city of Smyrna and the subsequent birth of Eleni with an identical sign on her shoulder—suggests the violent eradication of Greekness from the Turkish Republic and its subsequent (and altered) rebirth in the Greek nation-state. Mana’s exile in many ways epitomizes the exile of a large part of the Greek-speaking population from Asia Minor to Greece in the same period in which her storytelling takes place. Furthermore, the loss of the paradisiacally depicted Asia Minor home (Persephone) irresistibly reminds one of nostalgic visions of the Promised Land that is to be reconquered after a long period of dark, underworld existence, as the centuries of Ottoman rule are frequently referred to in Greek nationalist rhetoric. The reader never becomes familiar with the exact circumstances of Persephone’s disappearance, unless one accounts for Eleni’s dream, which is little else than the ancient myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades verbatim and which is strongly insistent on the sexual imagery of the act. Persephone vanishes somewhere on the way between Asia Minor and mainland Greece. She subsequently reappears as Mana’s second child, Eleni, a sickly child struck with epilepsy. Eleni is not an exact substitute for the original loss, but in her debilitating illness she is gifted with clairvoyance, which allows for the continuation of the female family tradition of speaking to the Tree. In her next incarnation Persephone is reborn yet again as Mana’s urban granddaughter Roula. Thus this trinity of female offspring, Persephone-Eleni-Roula, becomes the metaphor for the motherland whose “loss” is not permanent and that, after Mana’s Odyssean search across the mainland, resurfaces in modified form—as Eleni in the rural version of Greece and ultimately as Roula, her modern, still unsophisticated, at moments even vulgar, but temporally coexistent counterpart. As much as Eleni is not quite the child she lost, Mana’s arrival at a village in mainland Greece likewise does not create immediate positive recognition with the home she lost in Asia Minor. Still the motif of nostos figures large, and several characters recount their own homecoming episodes, which take place at different times but repeat themselves in eerily similar images. Mana’s first entrance into Rizes, where she discovers something of her lost Anatolian home, is replayed in uncanny detail in Roula’s arrival in the village on the



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occasion of Fotos’s death. Mana gradually uncovers affinities between her lost home and the land of her refuge, although it appeared to her alien and hostile at first. Analogies between the topography and architecture she left in Asia Minor and those of her new home emphasize the cultural continuity between the mainland and the territories under Hellenic influence. However, although emblematic of the migratory destinies of the Greek people and the trajectories of their cultural impact, this acknowledgment of sameness in no way creates an instantaneous affinity between the culture of mainland Greece and the Asia Minor Greek population. Even less does it allow the refugee smooth integration into the mainstream of the new community. Mana’s almost mystical connection to the sacred motherland is reiterated much more forcefully by her double symbolism as a founding matriarch and an earth deity. Mana conquers the land by her vegetative and reproductive powers, sharply contrasted with the aggressive masculine politics of physical conquest and founding acts of violence. Her manner of fruitful and lifereinforcing “conquest” of the land is even further juxtaposed with the brutality of the recurrent episodes of rape that she is subjected to at the hands of Demos. Her pain at the loss of her love child, Persephone, is inconsolable, also to a large degree due to the fact that all her other children represent a constant reminder that she begot them at the cost of losing her home and her love and by being exposed to perpetual humiliation. This is why in her nostalgia for the old home it assumes Edenic qualities, especially when contrasted to her current position as a refugee who is, moreover, in the eyes of her village hosts, not regarded as a victim of the Greek political elites’ territorial appetites, but instead blamed for their catastrophic ramifications. Mana’s monologues that relate her married life in her Asia Minor home before the Catastrophe of 1922 convey an idyllic atmosphere of mutual respect, love, and—related to it—fecundity and prosperity. The fecundity that Mana personifies is rendered not merely through her real name, that of the fertility goddess Demeter, but also through her natural reproductive capacity, resulting in her seven children. It is symbolically represented by the drawings of the beauty of nature, a Garden of Eden that her husband Andronikos paints all over her body with indelible colors. In one of the most poignant episodes in the text, two exiled women, Grandmother Maria, an Anatolian refugee from a previous Ottoman war, and the newly arrived Mana, relate their own stories of victimization in pivotal events in recent Greek history. Although separated from each other by almost a century, their respective narratives cut into one another and sound uncannily connected, as if they were part of the same story:

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“I was sixteen years old in 1824. I’d already had my Thodoros and my Aretoula. I was pregnant with Pelagia. My husband, a captain, was fighting the Turks . . .” “We weren’t at war with them. We lived among them, and everything was fine. They didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them. But when the Greek army went and took Smyrna . . . we took out the Greek flags that we had in our trunks, and put them out on our balconies . . .” “My captain was Kanaris’s righthand man. He was with him when he went to Pontos and Odessa. And he was with him when they burned Kara Ali’s flagship. And he was with him again in Samos, when they burned Hosref’s frigate.” “My husband, Andronikos, had a tannery at Dere, near the Great Bridge. He used to draw, too. Saints, and icons, and Alexander the Great. Just for the fun of it. And one day he marked a little cross on the shoulder of my daughter, Persephone.”46

The idyllic atmosphere of both their marriages is eradicated by the aggressive encroachment of politics and war. Grandmother’s husband is busy fighting the Turks in the liberation wars of the 1820s, while Mana’s beloved Andronikos and her daughter are lost to yet another war almost a century later. The end of their narrative(s) finds both women physically weakened by the accelerating pace of the events they are recounting and the culminating collapse of the two stories into an indistinguishable confusion of mass killing and fleeing. There is a sense of rootedness and mutual understanding that emerges as the common experience of both Mana’s and Grandmother’s lives. Grandmother’s war-induced exile is duplicated not only in Mana’s exile decades later but also in Roula’s postmodern displacement. This replication of circumstances is not the only thematic repetition in The Seventh Garment, as the novel teems with reprised events and rebirths situated inside a collapsed mythistorical time. Mana is forced out of her ancestral home in Asia Minor to Greece, but she never stops dreaming of the place from which she came with the wave of the population “exchange” of 1922. Her life as a refugee in Greece, and moreover as a woman “unprotected” by her man, is from then on immersed in a cycle of rapes and abuse. Her attempts to recreate the atmosphere of her lost land, captured in the image of a paradiselike garden she manages with her own hands, degenerate instead into a lifetime of rape and social exclusion. Paradoxically, Grandma Maria, who is also the grandmother of the rapist Demos, is the sole person who ever demonstrates any kindness toward Mana. The women recognize mutual affiliation on the

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cultural and linguistic level, and while this recognition enables the creation of a bond that defines their alterity and uniqueness within mainstream Greece, it also foreshadows friction between the two cultural experiences. Mana’s exclusion from the community granted to native Greeks compels one to ponder more deeply the structure that is welcoming to some yet prohibitive to others. It simultaneously poses some provocative questions about the cultural, linguistic, and racial inclusion (or exclusion) of Asia Minor Greeks into the corpus of the Greek nation. In his informative survey of Greek fiction based on the Catastrophe of 1922, published in 1977 and thus not including Fakinou’s novel, Thomas Doulis weighs the pros and cons of this event for the Greek nation, its statehood, and its economy. He discusses the influence exerted by the mass of refugees upon the Greek nation and the country’s economy and recognizes the swelling of the population caused by the arrival of refugees as a definitive step toward a sharp homogenization of the Greek national body, as well as the development of “a unified national culture.”47 Certainly, with the exclusion of the “alien” religious and cultural element after the “population exchange” with Turkey, the nation headed toward greater territorial and cultural homogeneity. In the shrinking of its national territory, Doulis uncovers the potential for a greater territorial integrity of Greece that accompanies the cultural integration and homogenization of its population. The refugee wave created a veritable upheaval, an ensemble of alterations that modified the Greek social landscape beyond recognition, whose magnitude did not leave a single sphere of life untransfigured. The consequences of these changes’ significant presence manifested themselves in all aspects of class refashionings: predominantly rural refugee populations swelling Greek urban centers and creating a new proletarian class; Asia Minor capitalists forced into the agrarian economy; the strong republican sentiment and autonomous governmental practices of the newcomers, which sharply contrasted with the perceived conformity to the Ottoman laws of the mainland Greece inhabitants; as well as other more or less visible social modifications. In short, the period could easily be defined as both the breaking and the making point of Greek political modernity. Doulis, who is perceptive about class issues, is however silent on the cultural and racial problematic, that is, the question of the “taintedness” and unassimilability of the Asia Minor Greeks, brought about by too close an encounter with an “alien” culture. Mana’s status as a social outcast is to a certain extent representative of the ways in which this difference is received in the cultural mainstream. For her part, Mana is able to identify herself with her new environment only in a landscape that is artificially made to look like The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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“home,” having been created by Grandma’s husband as a replica of what they left in Asia Minor. The process of the seamless integration of these exiled and alienated conationals with the mainland national body is, however, questionable; the two paradigms show more promise in relative tolerance and coexistence. This is why Mana’s adjustment to the Greek geographic and cultural space cannot but represent the intrusion of otherness—or, more precisely, of sameness cross-pollinated with alien influences that returns to the site of inception via a circuitous route. More than anything, this new Greekness, altered by too close a coexistence with irrational mystical cults and Eastern philosophy, tries to reclaim as its home the point of origin of rational thought. An illustration of the family’s reluctant acceptance by the Greek social sphere is the priest’s hesitant condoning of Mana’s insistence on performing a pagan burial ritual upon Fotos’s death. Even though this ritual seriously departs from the Christian one, the priest does not entirely prohibit it. Instead, he feigns indifference to the offensive tradition after successfully repossessing Fotos’s soul for Christianity by taking his full confession. At Fotos’s deathbed Roula is required to act as her mother, Archontoula, in order to calm her uncle’s conscience. One of the obstacles to his safe departure to the other world is his ignorance of whether he killed their father in time to prevent him from raping Archontoula. This is the secret that Archontoula took with her the morning she disappeared from the village and severed all ties with her family. Roula is therefore instructed in how to talk to the dying man and ease his conscience: “My Archontoula . . .” “My brother,” I whisper, as the old lady told me to. “Was I in time?” That’s all he says—“Was I in time?” I’ve been wondering exactly the same myself, ever since the old lady told me all those things this morning. I hug him, I kiss him, and I say: “Yes, my Fotos . . . Yes, my brother . . .” I no longer even know what I’m doing . . . I’ve fallen into his arms and I’m crying my eyes out and saying: “Relax now . . . You can relax now, everything is all right,” and “You saved me,” and all kinds of things that I don’t even know I’m saying.48

One of the implications of Fotos’s being late in saving his sister, however, is that Roula is not only acting as his sister but may well be one, if he was late. That is a possibility, however, that the text never resolves and that remains outside narrative closure, together with Persephone’s disappearance. The recurrence of rape perpetrated against three women—Mana; her daughter, Archontoula; and her granddaughter Roula—makes the already

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compelling power imbalance between the worlds of men and women even more explicit. Consistent with cyclical repetitions of mythical narrative, the text presents the reader with the destinies of three women that uncannily resemble one another. Following her arrival in Rizes and her first encounter with Maria’s grandson Demos, Mana’s life revolves around his unexpected visits to her hut and her numerous childbirths. All the idyll of her marriage to Andronikos vanishes, as Demos frequents her home solely for the purpose of raping her. On his first encounter with her body, Demos is forced to confront Andronikos’s drawings and after that never sees her naked again. Mana observes: “It stopped him in his tracks. At first he’d thought that I was a prostitute. Afterwards, though, he was frightened. He was scared of the drawings. He used to take me in the dark, with all my clothes on.”49 After encountering Andronikos’s drawings, Demos recognizes Mana’s body as a territory permanently marked by another man’s inscription; as such her body is clearly off-limits for him, but that does not stop him from brutalizing it in order to exercise power and revenge over his predecessor and his victim. An unprotected woman in a world where a woman’s body is a currency of exchange between men, Mana finds her only consolation in her eldest son, Fotos, who assumes this protective function for the whole family.50 Roula’s teenage sexual escapade with a much older ruthless businessman, who gladly pays for her abortion and abandons her after having his way with her, uncannily reiterates the abuse her female predecessors were subjected to. Handed down from her “lover” to the doctor who is to perform the abortion, Roula is further objectified and humiliated: “So that fucking doctor—I hope he dies and his balls drop off—started sucking my tits. First one, and then the other. And what the bloody hell was I supposed to do . . . ? Run away? But where to? If I ran off, who’d do the abortion . . . ? Because now I really wanted it done . . . I wanted it . . . I wanted to get rid of every shred of Sotiris that was inside me, and I never wanted to lay eyes on him again.”51 Roula’s harsh language gives a false impression of an emancipated city dweller who has learned to struggle with daily realities and, rather than passively accept things, is able to fight back. However, her position is barely distinguishable from Mana’s lack of alternatives in the spatially and temporally dislocated Rizes. There seems to be an uninterrupted continuity between Demos the rapist and Spiros the businessman, despite the circumstances that separate them. Being forced to have an abortion rather than to give birth to innumerable children is a minor transmutation of the projection of women’s bodies as dispensable objects. Only Archontoula’s decisive move in the wake of her father’s attempt to rape her creates a rupture in the seemingly incessant perpetuation of abuse. After Fotos murders their father, Archontoula makes The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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the big leap from her traditional village to the urban promise of Athens; yet whether her migration makes any difference to her life as a woman in a deeply patriarchal setting is one of the things about which the text remains silent and is instead attributed to her request that the family never contact her except on occasion of Fotos’s death.

Can Sacrifice Heal History? Historical reality is prohibitive to the realization of the individual subject. It is capable not only of constricting the individual but of literally crushing her. The use of history by Fakinou’s women narrators thus becomes even more important, since they appropriate it as a liberatory strategy inscribing their subjectivities within patriarchal mythologies—pre-Christian and Christian alike. Yet this claim may sound exaggerated when compared to the textual evidence in which Mana and her female progeny seem heavily invested in preserving the narrative of patriarchal lineage—even more so, in the context in which Mana herself, as well as her epileptic daughter Eleni, are community outcasts, the ultimate xenes (foreigners). They exist, rather than live, at the social margin delimited by the male member of the family whose lineage they are continuing (Demos). Eventually, however, their integration is imminent. This is not only due to the fact that, as refugees and strangers to the place they inhabit, their urge to belong overrides all others. A much more significant, although seemingly minor, gesture by two other women from Demos’s family helps Mana’s claim to the family legacy materialize. Bypassing patriarchal rules of heredity, Grandma Maria leaves a little shed to Mana and her ever-increasing progeny, the result of her grandson’s recurring acts of violence. Although tradition bars an unmarried woman’s rights to a man’s property, the matriarch’s decision attenuates this practice. Likewise, on her deathbed, Demos’s mother chooses to depart by making peace with Mana, whom she considered a culprit in her tragic destiny rather than a victim. These acts of female solidarity and recognition carry immense implications when juxtaposed with the overriding principles of the given historical context. Their importance lies in promoting a leeway, albeit a narrow one, for female agency, rather than in their self-subjecting implications. Mana and Eleni, who, at the side of the now departed Fotos, tell stories of the deaths of all Demos’s male ancestors, assign themselves a new role as the keepers of history—the writers of history, as the Tree defines them. Through their storytelling, the women keep alive the memory of seven generations of male family members, whose lives span no less than a century and a half and who all to the last fall victim to various instances of history. Mana retells the narrative as originally recounted by older female family members who

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preserved the memory of their husbands’ or sons’ deaths. The genealogical lineage, and therefore the history of the ancestors awaiting the dead Fotos in the other world, begins with the family patriarch and Grandma Maria’s husband, Captain Yiannis. Thus the family’s foundation is cotemporaneous and inextricably linked with the wars of liberation from the Ottomans and with the resulting exile of the captain and Grandma Maria from Asia Minor to Greece. The rest of the family history, clearly identified with the values of national liberty, follows its firstborn sons, all named Thodoros and Yiannis, consecutively.52 Their individual stories are rooted within and inseparable from national history, and each of the male progenitors is remembered by his name and by the recounting of the specific circumstances of his death. Even as all their deaths are undeniably caused by events relating to the national struggle, some of the male ancestors disappear under less than heroic circumstances. It is thus the task of these storytellers to establish them as worthy progenitors of their children’s family lineage. History does not efface their personal identities but instead represents a backdrop against which all of their individual tragedies take place. Although retelling the story of Demos’s family, the women’s narration neatly bypasses the offender. Not only is he a second-born son and as such of no consequence for the continuation of the family line, but no one save for four members of Mana’s own household is at all familiar with the circumstances of his death. If the victimized Mana could be said to have claimed any victory over Demos, it is by permanently obliterating him from the community memory and genealogical narrative. The storytelling strategy corroborates a rather subversive female inscription in the otherwise purely male genealogy. The subversiveness of this act lies first in the process in which the two women lend their bodies as mediums for the male ancestors to articulate their stories and further in the fact that Mana invests the event of Fotos’s death with mysticism that departs from Christian beliefs and originates in pagan mythology. Finally, by replacing the missing shirt of the seventh, and last, firstborn ancestor with her own bloodied garment, Mana not only claims membership in the family that disowned her but forcefully inscribes herself in the male family genealogy. The novel remains silent on whether she dies after carving the symbol of martyrdom on her body, but her inscription in blood becomes a permanent reminder of her own authority over the formerly male-owned narrative. By cutting a cross over her chest, at the exact spot where the trees painted by her beloved husband meet, she appropriates the symbol of Christ’s ordeal and engraves her own suffering into communal history. I read Mana’s sacrificial act in the light of a self-inscription whose effects appear even more empowering for the fact that they are confined within strict The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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social norms and beliefs. The novel graphically records violence perpetuated against women, but they heroically shoulder their suffering. Rather than feeling victimized, Fakinou’s women use the violence against them to fuel their realization as rightful subjects of history. Therefore, The Seventh Garment allows for a reading that views it neither as an unquestioning endorsement of patriarchal supremacy nor as an improbable feminist utopia. Despite some obvious pitfalls in the narrative process, the novel’s treatment of myth is interesting precisely in the sense that while it proposes an acknowledgment of patriarchy’s circumscribed limits, it does so only through an act of female inscription into the text of family lineage, memory, and ultimately history. Roula’s role as a link between the two coexistent visions of Greece, however, fails. Instead, she emphasizes the incongruity between traditional Greece and its prospects of urban modernity when she refuses to participate in the ritual preceding the burial of Fotos. Visibly disgusted by the performance being enacted for the purpose, she hastily leaves the village and decides to “save” a young niece by taking her to Athens. The potential for Roula’s integration into the family collapses, and together with it collapses the joining of the two stages of the nation’s existence. Any dialogue with the tradition that she obviously perceives as primitive and backward would ultimately lead to a failure that, in Roula’s interpretation, carries much more profound implications, since it translates into the failure of Greece to follow its ancient civilizing traditions, as well as the path to Europeanness: “How are we going to become Europeans . . . ? With bloodstained shirts and old women beating their chests and talking with the dead . . . ?”53 A similar failure of reconciliation concludes the highly contentious issue of Ismail’s identity crisis in The Life of Ismail Ferik-Pasha, for the seeming impossibility of connecting what is generally recognized as the Ottoman rupture in the continuity of Greek history. Some have recently voiced the need for a new interpretation of the Greek Ottoman period as the colonial past and the overall beneficial effect that such an approach would produce if certain parallels between the postcolonial and post-Ottoman conditions were considered with the close scrutiny they deserve.54 This proposition underscores the need for a modification of the dominant ways in which Greek and Balkan historiography in general treats the Ottoman period. Commonly dismissed as the “dark age” in national histories of the region, the Ottoman colonization is still perceived, for the most part, as a centuries-long interruption of the cultural development, historical continuity, and collective memory of the Balkans. The very otherness of the Ottoman colonizer causes the period to be indistinctively treated as an unremarkable, albeit prolonged void whose specificities, protagonists, and events do not deserve the same studious

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efforts dedicated to other historical ruptures, like the Balkan or world wars, for example. Such deliberate silence about this long period evidently carries the significance of a traumatic kernel for Greek collective consciousness. On the level of Ismail/Emmanuel’s personal history, Ottoman existence is likewise an unspeakable period. His Ottoman “rupture” takes up most of his life and extends between his symbolic and his actual death. Ismail’s semiOttoman subjectivity is thus that part of his being that remains permanently inassimilable and thus unrecognized by his father’s symbolic order. Precisely such an attempt at erasure of dangerous foreignness leads to the destruction of Ismail Ferik Pasha’s cenotaph by contemporary Greek authorities. Unlike the subject himself, who was for so long capable of sharing his identity between his own “self” and the “other,” the newly liberated culture expunges foreignness from within its national body. Together with other Turkish graves, the cenotaph is demolished for the purpose of erecting a school in its place, the prime institution of national culture. I do not intend to prompt hasty conclusions about the tolerance or intolerance of any particular national politics and imply that the Greek one emerges as more intolerant of Ismail’s ambiguous identity than was his adopted Ottoman culture. Rather, it seems that in many ways his double identity would be more easily tolerated in a culture that feels stable and, moreover, acts as an “impostor” over less established ones. It is the culture that is emerging under oppression and only struggling to establish itself as a viable entity that will treat as disloyalty any open departure from the homogeneity it poses as its ultimate goal: The cenotaph survived for a considerable number of years, approximately the same number as the years of Ismail Ferik Pasha’s life, shared between the island and Egypt. During the third decade of the following century, however, the erection of a communal school on the site brought about the destruction of the graves in what had until very recently been the Turkish cemetery, since they henceforth belonged irrevocably to a different nation with a different state religion and different requirements. Apart from anything else, the old graves were blatantly inconsonant with the Europeanized image the city was intent on presenting or at least acquiring with admirable speed. In certain quarters there were attempts, grounded on traditional oral accounts of the pasha’s secret Christianity, to protest against the destruction of the cenotaph, relegating all other versions concerning him to the written record of official history.55

Ismail’s cenotaph on the island of Crete suffers the same fate as many other sites of memory that the new nation conveniently abolishes on the grounds of The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

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their “alienness” to the Greek “natural” being. The only attempts at salvaging the past from oblivion are thus based on the selective preservation of mutually recognizable traits or on the elements of “sameness” that would facilitate the assimilation of the alien principle within the homogenous national code. Although Galanaki treats the Greek obsession with the revived link with classical antiquity in a way reminiscent of Kazantzakis’s passionate criticism of Greeks’ somnambulist adoration of their past, she refutes any chances of an easy (re)connection with Greek Europeanness through the destruction of Ottoman mementos. It is legitimate to suppose that Ismail/Emmanuel’s native culture at the time of the struggle against Ottoman impositions will prove to be unusually coercive and manifest considerably less tolerance for heterogeneity. Ismail was able to maintain the precarious balance of his double identity as an Ottoman subject, but when faced with the prospects of his father’s acceptance, he falters and commits suicide. Thus his duality, which presented little obstacle in his Ottoman life, becomes intolerable only once he attempts a return to his original, native self. When he is renamed by his own father, when he is once and for all reestablished in his father’s symbolic, the subject is expected to denounce his otherness because his father, brother, and their national cause demand this “sacrifice” of him. Resubjectivation requires that he extinguish the conflicting multiplicity of identities and embrace one as his ultimate identifier. The subject can thus continue to exist solely as Emmanuel, as his heterogeneity challenges the father’s symbolic. For this reason Ismail/ Emmanuel’s self-sacrifice can be considered either as his inability to give up part of his own being or, alternatively, as his inability to live with himself now that he once again belongs to what he considers his and his father’s own. In either case the subject in crisis cannot cope with the demands imposed upon him by the symbolic and is instead vanquished. His suicide is thus an act of de facto desubjectivation and simultaneously the only way to escape the unacceptable dictate to sacrifice part of his being to the demands posed before him by his familial, religious, or national integration. By killing all of himself the subject also liberates himself. Both Mana and Ismail are individuals who can define themselves as part of a particular culture/nation/family by most parameters commonly used in such characterizations, yet their identification with the matrix model fails. As virtual outcasts from their community they are driven to the act of self-sacrifice, but not before they in turn accomplish a forceful and visceral inscription of the history of their private trauma into the narrative that belongs to their family, community, and ultimately the nation. It is only



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through their self-sacrifice that these individuals “redeem” themselves and create the opportunity for the healing of history, which carries the ability to override communal ostracism and allow for their (albeit posthumous) reintegration. As self-sacrifice necessarily carries the potential for deconstruction, by inscribing themselves into the urtext of nationalist and patriarchal communal myth, the self-sacrificing protagonists in the same instant subvert this myth.

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Chapter 4 The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis : The Return of the Repressive

In the closing scenes of Želimir Žilnik’s Rani radovi (Early works) (1969), three angry men in factory overalls march through a proletarian neighborhood, grab a young woman by the arm, lead her out into the open field, and threaten to rape her. She defiantly confronts them and challenges their manliness. They are old friends, and she accuses them of cowardice and the inability to go all the way in anything they commenced in the past. The men shoot her, cover her corpse with a flag, and set it on fire with a handmade petrol bomb. The title of Žilnik’s film, from which this dramatic scene originates, refers to the early writings of Karl Marx, which also lend the film its nonfictional dialogues. Early Works builds on Žilnik’s documentary recording of the 1968 student demonstrations in Belgrade, arguably one of the key events in Yugoslav history, which had the potential (but failed) to turn back the tides of the rapid bureaucratization and social stratification of the country.1 The cast of Early Works consists of four young revolutionaries, three men and a girl, Yugoslava, who travel and travail the roads of Serbian villages for the purpose of educating the masses on the benefits of socialist revolution,

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Figure 4.1. Želimir Žilnik, Early Works, 1969. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik and Andrej Popović.

feminist emancipation, free love, and cultural and industrial progress.2 They would have easily found themselves among the students barricaded in the buildings of Belgrade University and defiantly withstanding the siege the year before. Their adventure begins with revolutionary zeal and romantic enthusiasm about “enlightening the masses” but soon uncovers relations untouched by the promise of the new socialist consciousness: brutality and violence permeating the relationships of man to man and customarily perpetuated against women. Regardless of all the Marxist ideals that inspire their “mission,” they themselves are not resistant to backwardness, primitivism, and distrust of the very people whose liberation they have set out to promote. Getting closer to nature, free love, and uninhibited existence, the protagonists realize their own inhibitions and unpreparedness for a life without structure and regulations. The film accentuates contemporary issues of Yugoslav reality, nationalist divisions, and the proverbial distrust that ethnic bureaucrats carefully maintained among Yugoslav ethnoreligious communities. What the would-be revolutionaries witness among “the people” are ignorance and isolationist prejudice, resounding with nationalist and chauvinist overtones that would ignominiously resurface in Yugoslav politics less than two decades The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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later. Yugoslava’s attempts at teaching women how to “liberate” themselves through contraceptive methods yield no results either. Žilnik’s peasants and proletarians are so stupefied by hard labor and poverty that they seem utterly incapable of comprehending the idea of their own class and individual emancipation. Tired, beaten (Yugoslava gets gang-raped in a village), and arrested, the disappointed would-be revolutionaries return from the country to find employment in a factory, where any revolutionary enthusiasm still surviving in them vanishes, suffocated by drudgery, toxic fumes, and the total absence of class consciousness among the proletariat. Yugoslava is eventually forced to return to the primitive living conditions of her wife-beating father and long-suffering mother, while her former speech, dominated by vacuous revolutionary slogans, rapidly shifts into reeling off equally meaningless proverbs and traditional wisdom. Her three companions seek her out; threaten to sexually assault her; and, frustrated at the failure of both their masculinity and their revolutionary ideals, shoot her, set her corpse on fire, and watch it burn, while the revolutionary funeral march, glorifying sacrifices for freedom, runs in the background: “You fallen victims / you sacrificed everything, / your blood, your life, and youth / all for liberty. / Struck by evil oppressors / you fell for the rights of your peoples. / Rest peacefully in your tomb, / with a banner of freedom we all head to battle.” This elegy for sacrifices for liberty, which cannot be won but instead invites ever more death, is the ultimate irony of the film, at whose very end a brotherhood of men abandons both ideals and love and thus conspires to sacrifice their only chance of liberation. Yugoslava assumes an almost allegorical meaning, both as a symbol for Yugoslavia and also as the feminine embodiment of a liberating life principle. She is the quintessence of the idea of free love, female emancipation, and humane socialist revolution—explicitly demonstrating that socialism is an ideal that needs to be achieved in the future rather than the state of contemporary Yugoslavia. Her sacrifice at the end of Early Works is a powerful commentary on the bankruptcy of the Yugoslav socialist ideal, smothered by the impotent male chauvinism inherent in virtually all social strata. Brutality against women is perpetrated both by proletarians and by supposedly urbane revolutionaries, whenever their virility is put to the test. The communist ideal of free love to which Yugoslava unselfishly lends her body proves to be little else than a manipulative trap invented for male gratification. Instances of the men’s underperformance or of any challenge to their potency are met with an instantaneous display of aggression, as in the scene in which one of Yugoslava’s companions brandishes a gun at her after he fails to sexually perform, or the one in which the men deal physically with Yugoslava, who tried to prevent them from taking turns raping a woman they met on the road.

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Figure 4.2. Želimir Žilnik, Early Works, 1969. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik and Andrej Popović.

When faced with the challenge of other men, however, her companions flee and abandon Yugoslava to rapists. Her earnest invitation to one of her fellow travelers to a relationship based on love is met with outward rejection, and she leaves the group defeated. The solidarity of the emotionally challenged and sexually frustrated men climaxes in the woman’s sacrificial pyre. The Black Wave films of the 1960s and 1970s were the first to shatter the symbolic sanctity of the heroic proletarian and peasant and degrade him from this utopian socialist-realist pedestal, which was never his to begin with.3 One of their recurrent themes is the country’s largely ignored and invisible poverty and deprivation, but also the depravity of the working and peasant classes, whom socialist ideologues, at least in their proclamations, designated as embodiments of progressive values and agents of social transformation, all while doing nothing to improve their working and living conditions. In their critical vision of the socialist regime’s inability to live up to its promise of equality and the good life for all, Black Wave films operate in the register of the intensely amplified social pathologies they denounce. Their exposure of the bleak reality of Yugoslav socialism and its corrupt practices uproots the delusional fantasy of its ideal society. The films of the Black Wave ran directly against official utopian narratives by presenting the misery of suburban slum dwellings, criminal gangs, street children, social misfits, The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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Figure 4.3. Želimir Žilnik, Early Works, 1969. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik and Andrej Popović.

and the daily hardships of the proletarian class, as well as other problems that made a powerful statement regarding contemporary socialist society yet whose existence the regime categorically denied.4 The never achieved promise of the full and unconditional emancipation of the masses and, following from this, true equality for women in every aspect of social life are perhaps among the worst failures of the socialist revolution. This is why in Black Wave films pervasive misogyny assumes the meaning of a powerful metaphor for all forms of atavism that block social development. Their bleak hyperrealist scan of the gutter of Yugoslav society exposes the persistence of unaltered gender relations, behaviors, and pathologies. With the exception of Makavejev’s work, Black Wave films suffer from an almost total absence of female characters recognizable at the level of audience identification. Most leading and important roles are male, while female protagonists generally act as two-dimensional props and outlets for frustrated male aggression. Svetlana Slapšak’s analysis of trends in Yugoslav film production notes a continuous tradition of female characters who are “sufficiently low-risk signifiers to be inscribed with the worst social phenomena.”5 She is correct in her claim that radical Yugoslav film and literature of the 1960s and 1970s reflect a growing antagonism against women by employing the feminine element almost entirely in clichéd forms: a beaten wife, a raped

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Figure 4.4. Želimir Žilnik, Early Works, 1969. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik and Andrej Popović.

slut, or an old and ugly hag, who usually respond obediently to the violence perpetrated against their bodies.6 Slapšak isolates the paradox that elucidates an uneasy relationship between the institution of social critique and official regime policies: cultural critique of the time failed to substantially address the growing phenomenon of stereotyping of women in cultural production, mostly for fear that any such criticism would reinforce regime positions while not benefiting women. This led to a situation in which the field of film and literary criticism “became almost exclusively the stronghold of masculine power.”7 However, Slapšak seems to suggest that the mistranslation of visual violence into accelerating repatriarchialization, fully endorsed and dominated by religious and nationalist institutions, is owing not only to the fact that these issues failed to be addressed and interpreted to audiences by the critical apparatus but also to the fact that this misogynist message underlies the actual artistic and intellectual production of the time. It is my opinion that in reflecting and refracting everyday socialist life thoroughly pervaded by misogyny and rigidly defined gender roles, Black Wave films performed this function with the required critical distance, which exculpates them from the accusation of actually forcing the idea down the populace’s throat.8 The radicalism of the Black Wave went head-on against idealist proclamations of gender and class equality, to which the socialist regime was The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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Figure 4.5. Želimir Žilnik, Early Works, 1969. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik and Andrej Popović.

allegedly dedicated. Yet what also comes through in their critique is that it is not enough to forever blame the institutional policies of Yugoslav socialism for the bankruptcy of its ideals, because serious responsibility rests in tradition, which proved quite impervious to emancipatory ideas.

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Figure 4.6. Želimir Žilnik, Early Works, 1969. Courtesy of Želimir Žilnik and Andrej Popović.

Žilnik’s Early Works falls in the category of the films Slapšak identifies as perpetuating stereotypes about women. Yugoslava is shown as a beautiful woman (played by a former Miss Serbia) who has little to say and generally speaks in a language consisting of slogans, proverbs, and quotations. In the course of the film, her body is sexually used, beaten, raped, murdered, and finally set on fire. If we consider Žilnik’s cruel portrayal of men— proletarians, peasants, and intelligentsia alike—we are able to conclude that he is in fact holding a mirror up to the ugly face of a society that has betrayed not only women but also all “marginal” social participants by its failed promises. Two years after Žilnik made Early Works, Dušan Makavejev would create the militant feminist Milena, in WR: Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the organism) (1971), who propagates the joys of orgasm as a cure for totalitarian militarism, class stratification, revolutionary uprisings, crime, and social conformity alike. Confronting the common belief in the potency and natural inclination toward life-affirming sexual activity among the peasant and proletarian classes, Milena diagnoses proletarian sex life as deprived of genuine human connectedness and linked to poverty: “You fuck drunken whores in toilets. You are poorly paid. Your own wives and children disrespect you.” She sees class society as the cause of moral, material, and sexual debasement of humanity and true socialism, which should be inextricable The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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Figure 4.7. Dušan Makavejev, WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 1971.

from physical love, as the only way toward human liberation. Defining debased Yugoslav proletarians and political ideologues alike as sex deprived and thus socially dangerous, she declares the need for genuine sexual revolution and gender equality: “No excitement can equal the elementary power of orgasm,” preaches Milena. “This is why politics is the business of those among us whose orgasm is insufficient, weak, defective, and premature.” Her roommate Jagoda (Strawberry) offers a practical example, with an endless orgy in which she is more the object for the sexually starved military officer Lyuba the Cock than the one receiving gratification. Milena is simultaneously assailed by the angry and aggressive proletarian Radmilović, who stalks her with raw gestures and sexual innuendos, and the elegant and manicured Soviet ice-skating champion Vladimir Ilyich, who lectures her on the weaknesses of the Yugoslav “third way” into communism (in Leninist phraseology). Preferring the refined sophistry of the Soviet “national artist” to the vulgar Serbian proletarian, Milena falls victim to Vladimir’s repressed sexual urges, which exist in seemingly irreconcilable opposition to his dedication to the communist revolution. Following sexual intercourse, Vladimir beheads Milena with a skate blade. During the inspection of Milena’s severed head in the morgue, a doctor and a police inspector conclude that her body

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Figure 4.8. Dušan Makavejev, WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 1971.

received four times the normal amount of ejaculate, although she was not a victim of a gang rape. The doctor’s suggestion that authorities check with asylums as to whether a sexually starved patient may be at large is interrupted by Milena’s bodiless head: “Cosmic rays pervaded our bodies. We pulsated with the rhythm of the Universe. But he could not bear it. . . . Vladimir is a man of noble impetuousness, a man of high ambition, of immense energy, romantic, ascetic, a genuine Red Fascist! Comrades, even now I am not ashamed of my communist past!” Both women, Yugoslava and Milena, pay dearly for their involvement with the revolutionary project and for witnessing men’s repressed sexual urges, underperformance, or impotence in bed and in the matters of revolution and politics. They share the same responsibility with their male comrades in political struggle, yet the men’s chauvinism never allows them to set aside their alleged masculine supremacy and their tendency toward ownership of both the female body and the public space. Makavejev generally shatters the stereotypical representation of women that Slapšak criticizes in other Black Wave films. Many of his leading female characters are rare exceptions in a multitude of narratives depicting brutality in gender relations under socialism, which denude sexual liberation merely as an excuse for men’s gratification, unsuppressed by commitments to the The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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Figure 4.9. Dušan Makavejev, WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 1971.

institution of the bourgeois family. Makavejev bases many of his films on Wilhelm Reich’s philosophy of sexual liberation as instrumental in the emancipation of society as a whole. Consequently, he allows his female characters more agency than most Black Wave authors. For example, in Ljubavni slučaj službenice PTT-a (The love affair; or, The case of a missing switchboard operator) (1967) Izabela is an emancipated and promiscuous individual apparently in full control of her life and the choices she makes. Makavejev reverses traditional gender roles, so that it is Izabela’s male partner who acts domesticated and family oriented. Izabela, on the other hand, refuses to harness her desires and energy to a home-bound existence, and she is the unfaithful one in the relationship. Her death at the end of the film may adduce the seductive conclusion that woman’s death is always necessary as a sacrifice to the monument of patriarchy. However, Makavejev complicates this by making her death an accident for which the man, a sanitation worker and rat exterminator, is held fully responsible, although he apparently had no intention of regaining his self-respect through punishing Izabela. Further, in Čovek nije tica (Man is not a bird) (1965), Rajka is a young and promiscuous woman, in a relationship with an older and married engineer contracted to complete a field job for a company; she is the one who dictates the conditions of their

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Figure 4.10. Dušan Makavejev, WR: Mysteries of the Organism. 1971.

relationship and does not allow herself to become a victim of her lover’s possessive need to control her. The battered wife of a proletarian in the same film has a more difficult way to go but after some self-education recognizes her debilitating dependency on her husband as “hypnosis” and metamorphoses into a conscious individual. Makavejev’s ultimate and most menacing female character, however, is Ana Planeta, the woman-as-revolution in Sweet Movie (1974), who sails the world on her ghostly ship shaped like Marx’s head, lures young men, and murders them with their consent during the sexual act.

Neither Revolution nor Revolt In place of making every sacrifice for freedom, humankind sacrifices the very freedom it has set out to achieve. Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Wilhelm Reich long before them, analyze the human inability, as well as the considerable human unwillingness, to bring about the changes that the ideal of liberation necessitates.9 Reich’s key question seeks to investigate why we desire our own repression. The controversy surrounding Reich’s work both in Nazi Germany and in the United States, where the government publicly destroyed his writings on two separate occasions, testifies to the fact that Reich’s question was and remains an uneasy one, not only for “totalitarian The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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regimes” but for the “free democratic world” as well. While Deleuze and Guattari concentrate on desire that makes us all slaves who willingly participate in our own unfreedom, Reich focuses on sexual liberation as the model of freedom as such. He departs both from “vulgar Marxism,” as he tags the Marxist emphasis on the exclusively economic basis of social relations, and from Freud’s conclusion that (sexual) repression is in the interest of “culture.” He concludes instead that sexual repression lies at the foundation of class society and its historically unchanged exploitation of marginal social groups: If one studies the history of sexual suppression and the etiology of sexual repression, one finds that it cannot be traced back to the beginnings of cultural development; suppression and repression, in other words, are not the presuppositions of cultural development. It was not until relatively late, with the establishment of an authoritarian patriarchy and the beginning of the division of the classes, that suppression of sexuality begins to make its appearance. It is at this stage that sexual interests in general begin to enter the service of a minority’s interest in material profit; in the patriarchal marriage and family this state of affairs assumes a solid organizational form.10

Reich perceives the “interlacing of socio-economic structure with the sexual structure of society” precisely in the institution of the “authoritarian family,” which interferes with sexuality at the earliest stages.11 Although ultimately pointing in the same direction, Reich’s view should not be misunderstood for that of Althusser, who likewise names the family as one of the key “ideological apparatuses,” because Althusser’s analysis is to a great extent oriented toward the Marxist economic structure, in which ideology serves the ultimate goal of the “reproduction of the means of production” for the sake of the perpetuation of economic exploitation.12 In contrast, Reich concentrates on the (un)attainability of freedom and claims that ideology, repression, and the perpetuation of class exploitation are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are mechanisms in the service of preventing humanity from attaining real freedom, a process that should lead to the cancellation of the totality of social structures and the end of the existing social order as such. The road to that freedom is through the unhindered circulation of sexual energy—Reich calls it “orgone” energy—whose deficiency creates a hysterical reaction of body cells that is manifested in the form of pathological behaviors and authoritarian tendencies but also in unquestioning conformity to social norms. The deficiency of this liberating orgone energy in the body leads to a state in which humans actively sabotage their own prospects for happiness. It is responsible for the character profile of both the autocrat

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and his subject, regardless of whether the subject is willingly invested in his own unfreedom or whether his indifference to social dynamics results in the same outcome.13 Both Makavejev and Žilnik show the Yugoslav socialist revolution as a failure not only because of the regime’s repression of individual political (and sexual) potential but also because of the socialist subjects’ lack of desire to achieve that potential. The bleak realism of the Black Wave reflects the reality of those classes whom socialism declaratively saw as the “pillars of the revolution,” only to deduce that the new social order had done little or nothing to alter their existence and perhaps even less to modify traditional gender roles. Not only do Yugoslav proletarians live in the same deplorable conditions as they did before the light of socialism touched them, but they exhibit unchanged contemptuous enjoyment in slapping, insulting, or raping women, as men always have. Even Yugoslava’s companions have little to offer on the path to liberation, save for slogans and the exhibition of uninhibited verbal and physical violence, both toward her and other women and among themselves. Antagonism within the male pact, mainly caused by every man’s attempt to possess Yugoslava, is eventually overcome, and they triumph over her dead body, united in vanquishing the object that contained their mutual hostility. Proclamations and slogans aside, the social strata in charge of their own liberation have no inkling of the role that history purportedly assigned them on the road to the ideal society, and they certainly cannot expect to be taken there by communist bureaucrats. They are the epitome of the lumpenproletariat, the “unredeemable” proletarian strata of whose ability to achieve class consciousness Marx was deeply suspicious yet whose frightening destructive power Bataille identifies as potentially momentous in antibourgeois struggle, should these abject social members indeed become mobilized.14 Bataille’s awe of the lumpenproletariat defines this social refuse in terms of the antiOedipal force without comparison, capable of the ultimate destruction with no remainder. Only anti-Oedipal forces—which are simultaneously emphatically anti-imperialist and savagely antisocial—feel liberated from the trappings of our consumerism/ideology/repression-saturated existence, and these are found in individuals who completely dissociate themselves from the common norms and commitments with which others surround and defend themselves: orphans, atheists, and nomads may thus instinctively be on the road to genuine liberation. Yugoslava and her male revolutionary entourage, in their attempt to sever all connections to their families and the life they knew before, represent precisely such an anti-Oedipal force. Žilnik’s lumpen, however, block the potential for their emancipation by their inability to shed traditional misogyny, in the same manner as do his benevolent The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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young revolutionaries. They fail, miserably faced with the sheer magnitude of the unstructured freedoms they proselytize, unable to create meaning out of the slogans they reiterate in an automated manner.15 In retrospect, thirty years after the death of its lifelong president, Tito, and twenty years since the country’s inglorious fragmentation, the second, socialist Yugoslavia looks like unfinished business. Its founding amid the bloodiest of battles in 1943 was less a democratic and more a visionary project of pro-Yugoslav-oriented individuals of different backgrounds. Throughout its existence it was governed by an assembly of men delegated by their constitutive republics (the so-called ethnic key) in an Oedipal relation with Tito’s paternal authority. Tito’s charisma was also the sole guarantor of the main foundation of Yugoslav multiculturalism, the official policy of ethnic cohabitation, or “brotherhood and unity,” as it was known. In post-Yugoslav years criticized as an ideological dogma, the policy of brotherhood and unity was in fact an established prohibition against the transgression of ethnonationalist chauvinisms that in World War II cost the Yugoslav people more war victims than the Nazi occupation. If we wished to extend the mythical metaphor, we could say that not even this imposition succeeded in overwriting the foundational rift, and Yugoslavia remains eponymous of a community founded on conflict and betrayal of one brother against another. Insidious patriarchalism in the official vocabulary of socialist equality is the subject of interest for much feminist scholarship in former Yugoslav countries but also in other (previously) socialist spaces. Admitting that the Yugoslav brand of socialism had some very positive immediate effects for the female population of the country, feminism presents these positive developments as almost accidental.16 Namely, despite women’s proportional participation in education and the workforce, gender was never considered separately from the issues of general equality and overall human rights.17 Official discourse, therefore, “had an androgynous overtone, which stifled the particularity of women” and instead channeled all its energies into the maintenance of the Yugoslav official policy of brotherhood and unity, or ethnic relations.18 In return, this created a situation in which the continuity of uninterrupted male domination is considered by some as the singular point of succession between the old “communist” and the new nationalist regimes in the Yugoslav heir states.19 The sacrificial scene from Early Works with which I opened this chapter is therefore important because it encapsulates the original sacrifice of the female body in the Balkan legend of immurement. Even the setting has changed only slightly, for these men may not be builders of a bridge, but they are proletarians, builders of a new socialist order whose promise of an

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enlightened future not yet achieved is already going sour. Regardless of the fact that Yugoslava does not peacefully accept her death, as does the legendary royal wife, her brave protestations are in vain: she must and will be sacrificed. The graphic violence contained in this encounter denudes the economy of gender relations that thoroughly informed the social structure of socialist Yugoslavia and consequently the brutality of the wars of its dissolution. Moreover, the legacy of hegemonic masculinities that remained untransformed during the period of Yugoslav socialist coexistence and exploded in the course of the wars of the 1990s remains a powerful undercurrent that continues to undermine the rehabilitation of Yugoslav heir societies. For this reason this scene invites a reconsideration of aggressive patriarchal culture as the collective perpetrator of Yugoslav destruction. Two very contrasting opinions can still be heard about the pan-Yugoslav bloodbath that ensued in the wake of ethnic and religious revivalism gaining momentum in the mid-to-late 1980s. One is that multicultural and multiethnic Yugoslavia was such an artificial creation, apparently in contrast to the purported natural homogeneity of nation-states, that it was almost begging to fall apart. The other shows ostensible ignorance of any of the problems implied in the former opinion and expresses shocked surprise at the events the general public “never saw coming.” Both sentiments are equally as false as they are logical.20 Yet why and at which particular moment did the war become possible? One view, resorting to grand narratives of ethnic and religious constructs, dominated international ex tempore reports on the Yugoslav wars and was basically intended to emphasize the supremacy of Western democratic and capitalist institutions over the region’s dysfunctional “totalitarian” and Balkan legacies. Another explanation, mostly favored by certain domestic audiences, blamed a conspiracy of international and homegrown elites for sacrificing the country to the neoliberal capitalist system. And yet again both opinions seem inaccurate as well as correct: Yugoslavia’s death was accomplished alone neither by hordes of nationalism-intoxicated barbarians nor by elites ushering in capitalism. Instead, the disintegration of the country was a long-term and joint effort that required not only “triggering” by foreign economic interests and homegrown political strongmen but also fertile soil on which this spark could produce its effect. Neither abrupt and anomalous nor the manifestation of some autochthonous Balkan backwardness, the lethal macho-nationalism that swamped Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s was the outburst of long-in-the-making phenomena that created both the conditions for its emergence and the kind of people required to take the drama to its extreme outcome. The eruption of violence came as a surprise generally to those who earnestly believed in the country’s famed The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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ideology of brotherhood and unity and enjoyed a privileged and relatively sheltered existence. To careful observers of the Yugoslav situation, however, the very fact that multicultural and multiconfessional cohabitation had to be imposed from “above” and guarded against narrow ethnic and religious interests was already a warning. It was therefore not entirely unexpected that the suppression of the so-called New Left wave of liberalization in 1968 had as its consequence the mushrooming of nationalisms across the country. Conservative factions in the Yugoslav Communist Party, at which the Belgrade students directed their protest in June 1968 and whom the discourse of the New Left explicitly named as responsible for the growing dysfunctionality of the federation, joined their former nationalist adversaries in efforts to stifle public critique operating under the Marxist motto of “merciless criticism of everything existing.” Directed against undesirable social tendencies, the Belgrade student protests were Marxist in essence and did not envision a change of the Yugoslav political system. Quite the opposite, the New Left insisted on socialism, but on so-called socialism with a human face, without social stratifications and fractional nationalisms. The legacy of the year 1968 is still the subject of debates both on the political left and among participants in the events, as well as in more conservative circles that denounce the protests as a “revolution without a revolution.” Some deplore the missed opportunity to, perhaps, overturn the course of events that led to growing nationalist sentiments, monumentalized in the 1974 Constitution, which functioned as a prequel for the partitioning of Yugoslavia two decades later. Others, however, tend to see the event as an operation staged by the regime as a pretext justifying the wave of repression that followed.21 It is impossible to enumerate all the suspect and actual promoters of New Left ideas who were in this way or that eliminated from professional and political life in the years following the student protests: professors of the Belgrade University School of Philosophy (nevertheless “allowed” to continue their work at an institute founded expressly for this purpose, but outside of the university, where they could disseminate dissent); the intellectuals gathered around the Korčula Summer School of Philosophy (1964–74) and its internationally renowned publication Praxis (banned in 1974); many filmmakers, writers, and public intellectuals; as well as some prominent people from the echelons of power with arguably “liberal” views, who likewise paid the price for their leniency with political liquidation. Furthermore, on the heels of the Croatian nationalist reaction and an attempted parliamentary coup of 1971 followed yet another wave of censorship in the media and culture. Interpreting the proposed measures of greater autonomy for Croatia

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as subversion of the multicultural character of the federation, the regime responded with arrests of leaders and participants and eliminations of their positions. Although these purges apparently indiscriminately removed both liberal and pronationalist intellectuals, a direct consequence of the renewed regime control over cultural life was the sanctioning of long-simmering anti-intellectual sentiment and the expressed need to “weed out” those elements from society who were “corrupting the socialist youth” with their “corrosive foreign ideas.”22 As a result, the space opened for the spreading of conservative and openly radical right-wing sentiments, popularized by those intellectuals who placed themselves in opposition to “communists” and “international liberals” alike. The following decade, of the 1980s, is going down in history as a period of unprecedented chaos on the Yugoslav social and political scene. Considered both the most wonderful and the most frightening decade of the country’s relatively short life, the 1980s had a few paradoxes of their own, like the fact that the percentage of the population who declared themselves “Yugoslavs” in the census was the highest ever, while at the same time there appeared increasing divisions along ethnic lines.23 The onset of the decade saw the death of Yugoslavia’s lifelong president, Tito, in May 1980, which caused shock and fear in the population. Much of the documentary material shown all over the former Yugoslav space on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Tito’s death retrospectively commented on scenes of the nation’s mourning as fear for the destiny of the country—and thus the nation’s own. And we can allow for the remote possibility that the grief that three decades later looks like the apprehension of a family of unruly children in the wake of the death of the “father” was in reality fear for their own future. Those in favor of familial metaphors could then see the orphaned children, spoiled by false social security and lacking initiative, as trashing their own house, clueless as to what to do with themselves. One of the biggest among Yugoslavia’s rapidly accumulating problems at the time was the increasing foreign economic pressure that arrived on the heels of the maturation of the country’s international loans. The inability of the weakened economy to offer guarantees for its growing indebtedness created conditions for the further weakening and ultimate liquidation of the unprofitable economy but also of socialist safety nets. This much neglected yet crucial factor, of the background of the Yugoslav dissolution, aimed at the introduction of the so-called free-market economy that in the early 1990s caused the rapid pauperization of the population, facilitated wars, and was responsible for the current state of the blatant economic and political colonization of the heir states. The 1980s were the last decade of the existence of The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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Yugoslavia and the period of the explosive concentration of the federation’s accumulated problems: the struggle for political power among contestants who had none of Tito’s charisma, the 60–100 percent annual inflation rate, the stagnant economy, choking international debt, rampant unemployment, workers’ strikes, periodic shortages of basic products like washing detergent and cooking oil. But it was also a period of social liberalization so rapid that it witnessed the side-by-side emergence of supposed paradoxes: extreme ideologies with capitalist economic practices, or religious revivalism hand-inhand with up-to-then unknown levels of corruption—in short, the situation that Ramet justifiably calls “apocalypse culture.”24 Backed by evidence of growing economic insecurity and conflicts in the leading structures of the federation, nationalist demagoguery got enough stage time for the dissemination of the idea that the grievances of ethnic groups are caused precisely by their forced cohabitation with their historical antagonists. Only by taking all these factors together can one begin to comprehend, and be less surprised by, the ostensibly abrupt revival of deadly nationalisms that quaked the federation on its weak legs, thrusting the whole country into a bloodbath. Nationalism is therefore better defined as the symptom and the executioner of the Yugoslav federation than the cause of its death. All the while this “movement” that swept Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was interpreted as a return to traditional European civic values of nationhood, citizenship, respect of the law and private property, or the rise in religious consciousness undermined by communist ideology. At the time it was defined as a veritable rapprochement with Europe and the legacy of the Enlightenment. As bastions of popular support of virulent nationalism and retrograde patriarchalism that arose in the 1980s, new traditionalists resurrected the discourse that essentially denied any positive achievements of socialist policies as alien ideologies purportedly undermining some rather undefined specificity of their respective ethnic or religious communities.25 Women’s rights, abortion laws, social equality, and tolerant cohabitation with ethnic and religious minorities are just some of the many policies that were under pressure by united conservatives across the country, already waging a war of words against each other. In the wake of the actual wars, the nationalist ideologues interpreted the Yugoslav experiment and attempted socialist economic relations as severance of people’s ties to their “natural” ethnoreligious traditions, economically defined by capitalism and bourgeois society (albeit barely nascent before World War II). Yet in the 1980s hyper-postmodern mayhem, which looked as if it had been caused by some strange instance of the absenteeism of the big Other, the cultural production seemed a kind of protest, but not against the socialist

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regime as such, which was as instrumental in facilitating the relatively unhindered spreading in the Yugoslav setting of Western cultural imports as it was growing increasingly irrelevant. It is safe to say that popular subculture that culminated in the 1980s was largely a product of the careful and selective redirection of the counterculture of the late 1960s, whose idea of total liberation of the human subject was wiped out in the aftermath of the 1968 student protests.26 More precisely, we can consider Yugoslav urban 1980s (sub)culture as part of a broader generational revolt, in the same manner in which youth cults and the alternative discourse of gay rights (in the face of raging AIDS) came to be perceived in the West proper: a contestation of traditional, petit-bourgeois gerontocracy.27 Some careful consideration could be given to the Yugoslav urban youth culture of the late 1980s, when music, as well as the whole cultural paradigm, underwent a transformation in response to the radical reintroduction of strong patriarchal and traditionalist momentum in mainstream culture. Although this protest was not clearly defined as a declaration in the narrow sense of the “political,” the challenge to its production of history through the territorial masculinist matrix already qualifies as political.

The Eroticism of Violence Regardless of the fact that the decisive factor in both the event of Yugoslavia’s creation and its fragmentation proved to be Serbo-Croatian relations, the momentum for the process of dissolution was in fact provided by tensions alongside the Serbo-Slovenian axis.28 The most significant period of Slovenian dissent, whose persistence and influence to a great degree determined the developments of the country’s dissolution, began with the early 1980s. It saw the emergence of two distinct groups of political dissidents, the Alternative Movement and the Society of Slovene Writers.29 The former gathered a very heterogeneous conglomerate of grassroots groups dedicated to particular issues and part of a broader alternative cultural scene, like, for example, the peace and ecology movement, and feminist or gay rights groups. Most significantly, this coalition introduced the latest ideas of Western alternative political movements to the Slovenian one-party system. The other group included the Society of Writers, whose mission was the promotion of a unique Slovenian linguistic and cultural space that would be distinct from that of the “Balkans.” These two streams gradually merged and increasingly insisted on the particular Slovenian national program, which eventually metamorphosed into an outright request for national independence. A sort of a cultural outlet for new politics was created in the Slovenian band Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) collective. Their The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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performative manipulation of Nazi iconography as the ultimate expression of political kitsch and its instrumental role in national evolution and state formation has been variously interpreted as “racist” or as “overidentification” with the totalitarianism of both Nazism and communism, which the collective collapses and presents as part of a common European capitalist heritage.30 At about the same time, another urban youth movement developed in Sarajevo, the New Primitivism collective. Despite its superficially different overtones, their discourse likewise employed overidentification, but with the other side of the Yugoslav mentality, which came to be defined as inherently Balkan, backward, and anticultural. The New Primitives consisted of several pop-rock bands and some “associated members.”31 Besides their characteristic music, which increasingly employed folk elements and was recognized as a distinct “Sarajevan sound,” the Primitives are best remembered for their famed TV sketch comedy Top lista nadrealista (The top list of surrealists), which ran between 1984 and 1991.32 Humorous and satirical about the Yugoslav political and economic crisis of the 1980s and employing the absurd as their signature expression, the Sarajevo “surrealists” tackled as much the daily troubles of the “common man” as the “Balkan mentality” and the associated vulgar mass culture that was increasingly being adopted as the dominant cultural idiom. Despite their distinct forms of performance and style, the NSK and the Primitives do not represent two incomparable cultural models, even less the boundary between the “cultured Mitteleurope” and the “backward Balkans,” discursively imposed as the fault line of the country’s fragmentation. Instead, the NSK and the Primitives may be seen as performing very similar forms of social critique, albeit through overidentification with only seemingly incomparable patterns. After all, the Nazi insignia, mystification of pseudo-symbols, and cold eroticism of the Volk mythology utilized by the NSK are as populist and pernicious as the intentionally low-culture commentary of the Primitives. The NSK is just a latent manifestation of the same kind of raw aggression that the Primitives openly exhibit. Ultimately, both the orderly discipline and sterile eroticism of the Nazis and the uncouthness and vulgarity of the Balkan stereotype effected an orgy of carnage, death, and destruction. In spite of the horrified abhorrence Europe (especially) demonstrated for the murderous spectacle of the Yugoslav tragedy, analyzing it through the paradigm of “ancient Balkan hatreds” or “the collapse of communism,” the NSK never fails to remind Europe “proper” that it too has a vampire in its not so ancient closet.33 In the light of the raging conflict, the mainstream cultural production of the 1990s war decade complied with the pattern of the blatant glorification of archaic machismo, street-gang violence, and war “heroism,” which

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unsurprisingly followed as a logical sequel after decades of imbalance between official proclamations and the traditional idiom in which society unabatedly continued to exist. A cross section of 1990s media in the Yugoslav heir states shows a proliferation of narratives that glorify perpetrators of raw street violence who are, more often than not, also hardened war criminals. Films, stories, and biopics giving prime time to larger-than-life criminal “heroes,” as brave in putting up a gunfight with other gangs as they were on the front lines against the hated ethnic enemy, became a media staple.34 Devotion to God and family was a mandatory subtext, since they were presented as good guys and regular family men who objectively meant no harm to anybody but were forced into crime through the mixture of war, economic crisis, the low standard of living, and overall despair and unemployment. More than anything else, these criminals were portrayed as rebels against their own victimhood in the general climate of resignation to hard life and poverty. In this context their criminal activities were only a means of survival and in service of their human dignity, as much as their war engagement was translated into a defense of the nation and religion.35 And while the violence of the war was spilling into the streets, or vice versa, the eroticized image of warlords and dangerous criminals became the role model for a whole generation of men.36 The aesthetic of this period’s cinematic production that helped create (or confirm) the image of the uncouth, violent, yet honorable Balkan male chauvinist rests on such stereotyped perceptions. Films like Milcho Manchevski’s Pred dozhdot (Before the rain) (1994), Emir Kusturica’s Podzemlje (Underground) (1995), Srđan Dragojević’s Lepa sela lepo gore (Pretty village, pretty flame) (1996), Goran Paskaljević’s Bure baruta (Cabaret Balkan) (1998), and Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001), to name just the “usual suspects,” are the ultimate examples of the self-Balkanizing paradigm that has all but completed the process of the repression of the feminine element.37 In an almost logical sequel to the Black Wave, which emphasized the profound rootedness of the machismo that is not disappearing any time soon, and where female bodies are raped, beaten, or otherwise brutalized or murdered, the films created at the time of the actual wars in Yugoslavia have no practical use for female characters. Whatever tension there exists is both created and resolved solely among men, usually friends from before the war and, consistent with the stereotype of a love relationship gone sour, now each other’s most bitter enemies. In the new setting female bodies are treated like small change in global problems in which men have the first and last word. It is their game after all. The still-persisting female presence in these narratives can be summarized as follows: imprisoned or killed by their own The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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family to prevent an interethnic relationship (Hana and her daughter); an outsider (Anne in Before the Rain); an archetypal cheated wife or a playful blond decoration (Vera and Natalija in Underground); murdered off-screen (Milan’s mother); another outsider (Lisa in Pretty Village); absent (the talkedabout girlfriend); and yet another outsider (Jane in No Man’s Land). True, female characters in Cabaret Balkan are more numerous and assigned a variety of roles, but all of them are unarguably only a transparent fuse for the seemingly ungrounded and frighteningly uncontrollable orgy of male aggression that culminates in an explosion of violence. Both Dragojević and Tanović end their films with memorable scenes in which the men use their last remaining energy for revenge over the enemy: in Pretty Village badly wounded Milan crawls through the Belgrade hospital in order to murder a Bosniak prisoner also treated there; in No Man’s Land Chiki, unseen by the UN soldiers surrounding him, draws the gun of a dead combatant in order to shoot a Serbian fighter. Apparently no amount of surveillance or pacification by international observers is enough to neutralize the hatred between warring communities, determined to annihilate one another under the very noses of peacekeeping mediators. In the face of the utter defeat of the Yugoslav woman, eradicated from the scene and persisting merely as an object of male aggression, or a good topic for a brawl and more violence among men, the films of selfBalkanization grant foreign female journalists exclusive access to the Yugoslav war games, which they observe, record, and interpret for their audiences. Thus Mančevski places his British journalist, Anne, in a romantic relationship with Aleksandar, a Macedonian-British photographer who has “killed” with his camera during his work in Bosnia. She seems to be the one who has taken the photos of the Albanian girl murdered by her own brother and becomes privy to the Balkan imbroglio through her involvement with Aleksandar. Jane, the British reporter from the Bosnian trench in which Tanović’s men find themselves in a deadly clinch with each other, only declaratively supports some kind of a resolution to the standoff. When Chiki and the Serbian fighter simultaneously fatally shoot each other, she makes sure that her cameraman gets a good shot of it. Only Lisa, the American journalist trapped inside the tunnel with the group of Serbian fighters in Pretty Villages, ultimately shows interest in learning more about the men and recording their stories. Compelled to act as one of them, she also pays the ultimate price. The function of these female external observers is purportedly to refocus the penetrating gaze of the Western (male) eye. However, this gaze is still the Western gaze, and it is neither more compassionate nor more invested in peaceful resolution of the conflict for the fact that it belongs to a woman. Just

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the opposite is the case, for these female reporters demonstrate the required level of professional disinterestedness and feel entirely at home in the chaos of war.38 The female journalists likewise do not disturb the already established balance of either gender or power relations: they are marginal to the conflict at the same time as they are viewed and treated as “almost men” (this is especially true in Pretty Village). It is virtually impossible to imagine a Yugoslav woman in this role in any of the films. Being “one of their own,” the level of intimacy would operate against her. She could never be their equal: she would simply have to be victimized. The postwar decade discovered the persistence of the same pernicious hierarchies in every sphere of Yugoslav heir societies. Their social landscapes currently function in an unchallenged hegemony of a medley of tycoons, politicians, war criminals, and various political dinosaurs from previous decades. The demonstrated unwillingness of the multiplicity of postYugoslav societies to deal with the criminal record of the war decade is evidence of the protective sentiment that new governments cultivate toward the masculine aggressiveness they can channel and utilize for political purposes. Oversaturation of daily life with violence has its unprecedented manifestations in the public sphere of post-Yugoslav societies: stadium hooliganism; street violence and open threats against the Roma, sexual minorities, or rare immigrants; the desecration of edifices belonging to “other” religious entities; the rapidly growing number of and membership in right-wing organizations. This list is not exhaustive, but it demonstrates to what extent these developments have modified the sacrificial logic that has always informed them and in turn has made space for a new type of sacrificial victim. The narrative of sacrifice therefore expands to include a different kind of corpse against which the community chooses to define itself. This new victim is an outsider to the community in which, but not for which, it dies. It is a cadaver sacer, to transmutate Agamben’s notion, that is nonritualistically offered on the altar of national unity. The corpse of an alien immigrant, or a racial other, emerges as devoid of any “sacredness” save the negative one that Agamben recognizes as a primary attribute of the victim whose life could “be killed but not sacrificed” to sustain the existing order, and as such it is significant solely for the difference it represents in the midst of aggressively imposed normative homogeneity.

The Political Geography of a Disintegrating Body If the persistence of traditional patriarchalism, which was one of the main targets of the critique present in Black Wave films, can be said to have been the nucleus from which dangerous nationalism was reborn in the 1980s, The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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it still does not explain how and why the supposedly developed urban and cosmopolitan Yugoslav culture so easily gave way and subjected itself to retrograde nationalism. Neither does it explain the clueless reaction of the generations of youth and “pioneers,” whom Tito himself in his speeches declared to be the force that made him fully confident Yugoslavia was in good hands (his now supremely ironic proclamations that with such youth the country and its people should not fear for their future). No less ironic is the fact that it was precisely the youth of the 1980s—let us tag them “the generation of the 1980s”—that had the least investment in the country’s past, the generation that acquired a distance from ideology, for whom being “Yugoslav” meant nothing more or less than being able to travel and enjoy almost Western consumerism, leading their urban existence with a whiff of petit-bourgeois ennui, reveling in its pseudo-rebellious rock music and fads, that were the first summoned to report and to be sacrificed to the calls of some abruptly rediscovered ethnoreligious identitarian politics.39 Or, alternatively, to simply leave. This is perhaps why many consolidation narratives written (or filmed) about Yugoslavia in the years since the wars ended have as their main protagonist an exile looking back on his formative years during Yugoslavia’s final decade and trying to make sense of the events that landed him in his current situation. The exile remembers this anachronistic country with just a hint of Yugonostalgia that now occupies a rather neutral connotative register.40 Such a protagonist is sufficiently temporally distanced from political events in the decades preceding the latest wars, as well as rather nonchalant about the ideological struggle that accompanied the post–World War II decades. He would be fed ideology through educational and social outlets, yet this ideology is already distilled to nonsense, and he generally considers it a ridiculous nuisance and a remnant of a past era that does not affect him. He has little knowledge of economic strife and grows up at a time of socialist consumerism, unlimited travel, and the relatively free flow of influences from abroad, both East and West. As a result, he is capable of parodying the values that his parents lived by and is a representative of the entire generation of moral idiots, or “a generation of non-subjects,” as Iveković calls them, for whom the war came out of the blue.41 Having been force-fed their parents’ sacrificial narratives, they regularly found themselves in the role of mere beneficiaries of those sacrifices. This fact alone, however, does not justify the lack of awareness characteristic of such a typical protagonist who acknowledges his underexposure to life decades later and from a safe spatial distance. Nowhere Man (2002), the first novel by Chicago-based Bosnian American author Aleksandar Hemon, deals with a displaced individual, a lost generation, and an already dead country in its rather fragmented and incomplete

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portrayal of the protagonist, Jozef Pronek, given by several different narrators who encounter him at various stages and places he occupies during his life. Consisting of seven chapters whose narratives are rather loosely connected, the novel is vaguely reminiscent of Emir Kusturica’s film Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell (Do you remember Dolly Bell) (1981), while its final chapter is an ironic take on Danilo Kiš’s Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A tomb for Boris Davidovich) (1976). It is a very fragmented, occasionally patchy Bildungsroman ending in a total collapse of all the integrity of the narrative. Nowhere Man opens with a narrative voice that recounts the anxietyridden life of an exile from the Bosnian war in Chicago in 1994, his new experience related in expressions of negativity: the nothingness, death, and emptiness that surround him. The same narrative voice and the same anxiety, this time in a bridal chamber in Shanghai, round off the narrative some six years later. Despite the generally humorous tone of the novel, depicting the almost stereotypical situations an immigrant to the United States has to deal with, the prevalent emotion is one of displacement, uncertainty, unfamiliar distress, and pain. Each chapter is a snapshot of a spatiotemporal situation in which a different part of Jozef’s life is revealed, from his careless growing up in Sarajevo, and his summer stay in Ukraine in the wake of the Bosnian war, through his mental breakdown in Chicago. His nostalgically depicted Bosnian-Yugoslav years are in stark contrast with his American life, where he struggles with unwelcoming suspicion toward immigrants, joblessness, and the cultural differences reflected in his linguistic incompetence. Behind the American myth of openness to newcomers and tolerance of all creeds, he encounters axiomatic belief in the supremacy of the United States over the rest of the world and neither awareness nor desire of the people to learn anything outside of a prepackaged set of information about “the rest.” Almost too stubbornly not to be symptomatic, Jozef’s narrative exhibits a rather laissez-faire attitude that the text presents as a trademark of the entire 1980s generation. Sarajevo in the 1980s is a “beautiful place to be young,” and Jozef Pronek is a bona fide child of 1980s urban culture, carelessly floating through life, interested in music and love affairs and without much idea of either his future or anything that does not directly concern him.42 The narrative leisurely recounts Jozef’s growing up in Sarajevo, his adolescent love affairs, and the boredom of military service. In short, all we ever learn about Pronek’s Yugoslav years is his good life that preceded everything that happened “later” and culminated in the tragedy of the Bosnian war. He claims that he consciously represses negative memories related to less sweet events from his youth in Bosnia: “I remember the hateful moments in crowded, smoky bars,” or “the guy in the hospital bed next to mine whose thighs and The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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ass were all cut up after a toilet bowl fell apart under him. But I choose not to think of those as important, my memories irrevocably coated in linden syrup.”43 Ideology and its outlets are noted, only to be ridiculed as harmless parts of Jozef’s process of maturing. School programs emphasize the study of the English language, which his parents, educated in the decade of the Soviet political influences, do not understand. Jozef utilizes this advantage over them to deter their suspicion about the music his band plays, when he translates the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” as a song “about a balloon that wanted to be free”; likewise, “Everybody Loves Somebody (Sometimes)” is about “a burglar who stole from rich old people and gave to poor kids.”44 While serving his mandatory year in the Yugoslav Army, he becomes aware of the oppressiveness of empty slogans and the futility of the army routine: “the army’s idea of what becoming a man meant was the exact opposite of Pronek’s: perpetual humiliation was its main tool.”45 The military—the foundational structure of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity—is depicted as the chief propagator and perpetrator of homosocial macho culture, and Jozef constantly feels that none of what is going on there concerns him. Predictably, Jozef constantly falls short of the army’s expectations and its methods of building character: “[he] felt guilty for not being patriotic enough, for not being tougher, for despising [his] comrades content with the pleasures of masturbation and bad cigarettes.”46 Yet throughout his reminiscences he deliberately and consistently fails to divulge any details related to the ongoing war. Years into his Chicago selfexile from the madness of Yugoslav carnage and proliferating identities, Jozef Pronek refuses to identify with any of them, insisting simply that he is “from Bosnia” and very “complicated.” Pronek’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the war and accept the label of its victim strikes the reader with the full force of a bad case of denial. He keeps disappointing his American hosts, who demand that he demonstrate the pain and wisdom that come with the knowledge of war horrors and that became the fixed image of a person from Yugoslavia in the 1990s, laconically stating that he was “not there” when the war happened and did not know what it was like. Like any photo album, the novel only contains specific moments in Jozef’s life to which we become privy, and there are wide gaps between them that the narrative intentionally leaves unknown territory. Jozef moves through his new American life without the necessary acknowledgment of his past—all we learn about his previous life in Yugoslavia is told by other narrators—and insistently declines the very awareness of the war carnage that shadows his immigrant existence. As a compensation for the repressed guilt he feels for not being “there,” he engages in token activism, canvassing for Greenpeace and chasing alimony dodgers

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for a private detective agency. Yet the evidence of the war back home lurks in the newspaper headlines he accidentally reads on train rides between job interviews and administrative appointments around Chicago. It is this subtext that acts as a constant presence in his subconscious but that he makes every effort to ignore. The anxiety created by this insistence on repressing the knowledge of war and his feeling of guilt for not being there return to haunt him through his poor English and errors that his American girlfriend keeps correcting in a most irritating manner. Ultimately, the repressed agony of the former country rises in a slow crescendo until it reaches the force of a violent explosion. Jozef outlines a fragmented geography of Yugoslavia exclusively through the bodies of women from its various provinces he dated during his youth in Sarajevo. Ironically, his sexual pan-Yugoslav geography comes into focus a decade later in the obscene spectacle of mutilated and scattered body parts. When the horror of the Bosnian war assaults his consciousness, Jozef remembers each locale mentioned in the news according to different women in his life, all of whom are in one way or another linked to the sites of the worst fighting. The news of the massacre of the people of Goražde, for example, sends Jozef reminiscing about a girl from that town who taught him how to kiss; on the Croatian coast he met a girl from Belgrade, whose army officer father ridiculed their pubescent love and their plan to elope; his first real love story happened with a woman from Sarajevo whose tragedy he witnesses on TV: she remains legless after the shelling of a bread line in the city. Female bodies, whose destiny faithfully mimics the country’s mutilated and violated integrity, recreate the common space of the torn country. His love woes, which occupy his conscious memory upon hearing such news, seem out of place amid physical ruin and death. A poignant testimony to this perpetuation of violence against women, which only further emphasizes the discourse of the exhibition of macho violence, is a letter to Pronek from his childhood friend now fighting in the Bosnian trenches. In the letter the friend relates his vision of war: boys building a fortress and fighting other boys to defend their territory. One of his most striking experiences of the war is a love story between an enemy soldier and a woman whom he and his sniper friends observed daily, at first considering whether to spare them for the sake of love. Yet on the occasion of seeing the soldier acquiescing to the apparent commanding gestures of the woman, the snipers killed him. The letter writer concludes matter-of-factly: “if woman can tell him what he must do, he cannot live,”47 revealing the kind of frustrated machismo that was behind the atrocities committed on all the sides in the conflict.48 Far from having been eradicated by the socialist legislation The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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in the previous decades, patriarchal violence was in fact perpetuated by the almost complete immersion of Yugoslav society in the culture of concealed aggressiveness promoted by Tito’s personality cult (the Big Father), the glorification of the army, and the fascistoid health and body devotion manifested by grandiose collective exercises on Tito’s purported birthday.49 Nataša Kovačević recognizes such phallic violence worship as spelling the demise of both the urban culture of Yugoslavia of the 1980s and the official supraethnic ideology of brotherhood and unity.50 While this militant aesthetics is “deeply embedded” across Yugoslav society and its institutions, it is not appropriated by any particular ethnoreligious group, Kovačević states: “the ideal of aggressive masculinity, while encouraged by the cult of the army and by paternalism of the state and its supreme leader, Marshal Tito, is not limited to any particular ethnicity, locale, or institution but underlies family relations, friendships and love affairs alike. Intimations of violence in interpersonal relationships and the need to prove one’s manhood are ubiquitous.”51 Repressive patriarchal culture is an extension of a global reality that was only seemingly pushed into the backseat and then reemerged in many post-everything societies in recent history. Hemon expands the Yugoslav experience in a broader Eastern European context with his Ukrainian American narrator. Victor Plavchuk was brought up on nationalist fantasies of independent Ukraine and the glorification of dubiously heroic undertakings of local freedom fighters, as recounted by his wife-beating, hell-raising father, whose only faintly “humane” moments are connected to his singing songs from the Ukrainian nationalist repertoire. Unlike Victor, who dedicates his life to the pursuit of esoteric topics in literature, his brother, as a true son of his father, enlists for war and is killed in Vietnam: “My mom blamed my dad for her son’s death,” says Victor; “she blamed all his fallacious army stories, all that sleeping-in-the-woods bullshit that deluded my brother into thinking that the army built a man’s character—it kills the body, she wailed, screw the character, my son’s body is gone.”52 Hemon’s Nowhere Man closes with Jozef’s mental breakdown, but also with the ultimate collapse of illusions about Yugoslavia, revolutionary ideals, and pretty much the entire twentieth century. Jozef’s stubborn denial and failure to acknowledge what exactly is the “little creature” that throughout the narrative “claws” in his body cause his aggressive outbreak that smashes the carefully constructed facade of denial with terrible but hopefully liberating force. Jozef’s guard explodes during an encounter with a mouse that invades his apartment, when he is faced with the embodiment of his own anxiety he has pretended to have kept under control and that has precluded his assimilation into his adopted culture. In this humorously bitter episode,

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Pronek and his American girlfriend conspire against the unwanted visitor, smashing it with a book.53 His instinctively swift execution of the stealthy creature that has been inhabiting a parallel reality out of his sight for an unknown period of time acts as a recognition point between Jozef the refugee and the dirty animal nobody wants to meet in their household, although they are vaguely aware that it inhabits a space in their close proximity. The animal’s death throes instigate Jozef’s accumulated pain, and he sinks into mesmerized destruction of household furniture, with his girlfriend taking photos of the outburst. The novel ends with an ironic rewriting of Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) that shatters any respect remaining for twentieth-century august ideals. In place of Kiš’s pre–World War II communist revolutionary, Boris Davidovich, and the breathless renditions of his identity changes, successful mimicry, and evasions of global police pursuits, Hemon inserts a certain Captain Pick: a false refugee, a drug addict, and a vagrant conman who, with dynamics comparable to those of Kiš’s communist revolutionary (and for considerable profit), exchanges identities, religions, and fabricated tales of strife. In place of Kiš’s tragic member of the Communist International, who is destroyed by the very ideology he helped perpetuate, Hemon substitutes a rat-canal lowlife criminal in pursuit of opportunity in circumstances of political instability. Both visions are nihilistic in their treatment of the destruction of human integrity, bodies, and ideals, but while Kiš’s revolutionary dies supposedly defending higher moral principles in the face of their betrayal, Hemon’s Captain Pick does not even pretend to possess any ethical principles whatsoever. He does what he does because he can. Pick’s adventures expose pernicious ideologies as cover-ups legitimating criminal mobilization of rabble by the elites. Massive population destruction, exoduses, revolutions, and self-sacrifices for ideals are merely collateral effects of real-life corporate mafia interests. Whatever this disillusioned ending has to say about the particularities of the Yugoslav tragedy is left to the reader to deduce.

A Chauvinist Contagion and Its Victims While Hemon approaches Yugoslavia in the course of its dissolution and the multiple sacrifices being made for particular ethnic nationalisms, Miljenko Jergović reconstructs the “crime” of founding a new post-nation over the corpse of a new kind of nonritualistic sacrifice. The 2007 novel of this prolific Bosnian writer who chose to “exile” himself to Croatia during the war, Srda pjeva u ponoć na duhove (Srda is singing on All Saints Night), represents an addition to his series of narratives of various genres concerned The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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with the history of the common country and the current period of transition in the Yugoslav heir states. The narrative of Srda opens in present-day Croatia and takes place in the period between 1991 and 2005 yet winds each of the individual stories as far back as the days of World War II and the postwar creation of the second Yugoslavia in an attempt to search for the causes of its dissolution. Like a medical chart of a very sick society, the novel looks for incidences of present-day diseases in the old family histories of its protagonists and perpetrators. Jergović records the seemingly independent stories of five men, all of whom are in one way or another linked to the unclaimed corpse of a strangled twelve-year-old Roma girl of unknown name and origin. Despite its five hundred pages of intense narration, this novel resists summarization, as it has rather a loose structure, the only thread that links all its parts on the surface being the girl’s dead body and the investigation of her murder. Through strange causalities, the text reveals the terror of the repressed past that to an unprecedented degree informs and dictates the present and that links the destinies of a multitude of protagonists with the corpse. The frozen corpse in the morgue to which Jergović consistently returns in his narration thus lingers like the repressed guilt of the entire community. The set of characters in Srda Is Singing on All Saints Night emphasizes both the multiethnic character of Yugoslavia and its postdissolution legacy: Lazar, a Croatian Serb and a former policeman, employed in independent Croatia as a night watchman at the morgue, apparently feels a strange desire for the dead girl’s body; Lovro, who makes it his personal cause to find the girl’s murderer, is a Bosnian Croat and a police inspector, who after discovering a family connection to the World War II Croatian Nazi puppet state, loses his child to a terrifying death; Ile, a Bosnian Croat and a loafer whose lifeturning moment comes during the Croatian army bombing of the Serbian refugee convoy, arrives in Zagreb with the proud mission of killing nonCroats and is forced into confessing the murder of the little girl; Svjetlan, an NGO worker, is the son of a Belgrade doctor with his ancestry in the upper echelons of the Croatian collaborationist regime; and, finally, the businessman Toma is a grandson of the Czech dressmaker to the Serbian pre–World War I queen. The narrative privileges none of the protagonists or their personal and family histories, some of which come about as a direct consequence of greater events, while others do not. Their paths never crossed before, but now they are inextricably connected by the bizarre crime and the frozen body of evidence. Despite the Croatian setting of the novel, all the main protagonists and potential suspects in the murder have distinctly dislocated identities. Their ethnoreligious affiliations gained in significance once the Yugoslav story turned deadly, and they all now suffer from various degrees of

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identity anxiety and alienation in the Croatian capital. Many of the novel’s 545 pages are filled with Jergović’s captivating narrative digressions delving deep into the protagonists’ family histories, which at the same time create an alternative history of the country that once united their mixed origins. This history is dissimilar from the official one, not by virtue of occluding and ignoring the ethnoreligious differences that have always characterized that strange country, but by demonstrating the necessary codependence of various communities occupying the Yugoslav space, as well as the many benefits of such peaceful cohabitation. The novel closes with the discovery of Lazar’s dead body lying over the girl’s corpse, although it is not clear what kind of event or desire led to this outcome. Meanwhile, the police investigator, Lovro, barely survives a car accident that struck him on the point of uncovering Svjetlan and Toma’s homoerotic association and their joint involvement in the murder of the girl. This does not offer a narrative closure, for as Lovro lies in a hospital, in very bad shape after the accident, anxious to expose the suspects upon his release, life on the outside goes on as usual. Protagonists’ bodies exist in an unwillingly symbiotic relationship with history, and both their hardships and their epiphanic, liberatory moments occur in relation to historical developments. The language of visceral reaction and metaphors of decaying anatomy and disease dominate the text. Lazar’s father, a former convict from the anti-Stalinist purges, who refuses to talk after returning from the Goli Otok labor camp, turns into a religious fanatic and preacher on the day of Tito’s death; Lazar’s mother sinks into a coma during Milošević’s Kosovo speech.54 Svjetlan’s father, a World War II partisan guerilla fighter, passionately writes his atlas of epidemics, which is supposed to prove beyond doubt that Yugoslavia is indivisible because its entire territory is affected by the same epidemics, lice infestation being the most common of all, affecting all religions and ethnicities without exception. He is particularly interested in an outburst of deadly smallpox, which was thought long eradicated before it hit Yugoslavia in 1972.55 “Death is contagious like the nation,” states Svjetlan’s father, a renowned Belgrade doctor.56 The novel is an x-ray of all the known ailments of the collapsed post-Yugoslav societies: rampant nationalism, scandals, racist violence, profiteering, political corruption, crime, and murky economic enterprises, which have nothing and everything to do with each individual protagonist. Although the text strongly suggests that the culprit for the murder may be found in the uncanny interaction between incurable nationalism (Ile) and homoeroticism (Svjetlan and Toma), the resolution of the crime is indefinitely postponed by the inspector’s prolonged recovery. Jergović expands his use of the body metaphor to all of Bosnia, disThe Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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integrating in the center of Yugoslavia, surrounded by the narcissistic indifference of other ethnic provinces. The image is of a Bosnian high school student affected with leukemia, who slowly withers away among his Belgrade classmates somewhere toward the end of the 1980s. Barely acknowledged by his fellow students for years, in prolonged agony for the several months it takes him to die, Amir attracts their unmitigated attention as they compete in acts of kindness to the increasingly corpselike boy. Amir’s dying presence creates a pseudo-religious atmosphere in which any banality he utters or any move he makes instantaneously becomes invested with wisdom and meaning. A Bosnian in Belgrade, he is made to signify one of the last genuine “products” of the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity and slowly expires in full view of the last truly “Yugoslav” generation of school kids— elitist, blasé, snobbish, cold, and cruel: “those petty snobs and those little Belgrade brats genuinely loved that graying Bosnian corpse, which stubbornly refused to die.”57 In the atmosphere of rising chauvinism, attention zoomed in on Bosnia and its city of Sarajevo as the ultimate symbol of the disintegrating Yugoslav multicultural experiment. Such a climate could to a certain extent explain the sudden focus on the urban culture of Sarajevo throughout the 1980s, but especially so toward the end of the decade, when the scene was making desperate attempts to maintain some kind of sanity amid the increasing calls to arms.58 Jergović portrays the generation of urban Yugoslav youth who were supposed to continue the legacy of peaceful cohabitation in the common country but who remained utterly lost when their ironic disinterestedness gave way to the ever louder Blut und Boden calls. The text suggests that in an environment in which nobody believes in anything it is easy to disseminate irrational ideologies, false prophecies, superstitions, and blatant stupidity, the mushrooming of which in the dissolution-affected Yugoslav territories of the 1990s became a fascinating phenomenon. Jergović continues: “In the lazy midsummer Belgrade, which was already getting ready for the beach, hoping that the so-called yogurt revolution in Novi Sad would be over in the meantime, it would not at all be surprising if a boy affected with leukemia is declared charismatic, and then a saint, whose wisdom and might would save us on doomsday. Nobody believed in anything there, which sent clerics of all colors into a rage, but there is never a better foundation for prophets, saints, and conjurors than disbelief and atheism.”59 This particular point builds on the discourse that has marked the whole post-Yugoslav period: that the alleged atheism of the “communists” led to the post–World War II destruction of the bourgeois social structure defined by a set of values and beliefs. In such a society unfounded on traditional values it is easy to disseminate any kind of distorted truths,

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and this is precisely what happened to the country, whose basic premise was atheistic disbelief. However, the falsity of such a premise, of a firm doctrine as conducive of critical judgment and a deterrent to irrationality, becomes obvious when placed alongside the ethnoreligious mythomania of the period. Jergović equally mercilessly deconstructs the notion of heroic sacrifices for the “greater common good,” while the sacrificial legend metamorphoses into an ordinary crime significant only for its own sake. It does not matter who killed the girl and why; that piece of factual evidence is never available to the reader. Jergović envisions the nationalist enterprise as a criminal conspiracy of men with secret lives and even more suspicious mutual interactions. Their dealings are not motivated by genuine ideals or even ideologies, and any casualties found on their trail are purely collateral, divested of any sacred meaning or the aura of victimhood. Internal social tensions within independent Croatia, plagued by the usual problems of economic transition, corruption, and racism, as well as the legacy of the war, are condensed so fervently that the society seems to be at the bursting point. If, according to Girard, the necessary condition for any sacrifice is that the victim be “incapable of propagating further violence,” the murdered Roma girl, who carries all the attributes of her difference, whether racial, gendered, or social, seems like an ideal choice.60 She is a “substitute for all the members of the community,” which no longer sacrifices its own, who as an ultimate outsider cannot and will not start a chain of revenge for her death.61 She has no attachments, papers, address, or even home or country of origin. Nobody has any knowledge of her, and nobody claims her. Therefore, the sacrifice of Srda Kapurova (the moniker given to the dead girl) “serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself.”62 For all that, she may be the ideal “sacred” substance, the ultimate outsider who can be killed and whose disappearance, with some luck, will not even instigate a criminal investigation. The sacrifice of the ultimate other—illegal immigrant, paperless and unknown, a Roma, and moreover a female—is an act of the prevention of social implosion. Simultaneously, her corpse, whose very material existence is disputed, is a poignant symbol of the country whose existence and history have been the object of so much denial that many reject the idea that they ever lived in it. Jergović examines the historical legacy of Yugoslav constitutional ethnicities in an attempt to uncover the causes of the country’s dissolution. This method is characteristic of his obstinate attempts to disallow the memory of that once common country to conveniently sink into oblivion.63 His writing is not nostalgic, and he himself does not express melancholy for Yugoslavia. In fact, many of his public interviews and comments during the wars of the The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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1990s speak to the contrary. However, he emphasizes as a simple and undeniable fact that he spent twenty-five years of his life in Yugoslavia, while most of the demagogues who implicated themselves in destroying the very memory of that country lived there even longer. For over two decades the leading establishments of Yugoslav heir states have been parroting nationalist rhetoric that justifies the dissolution. The former country has been represented as an untenable utopia, a repressive prison house of nations and individual freedoms in which, if we are to trust the new nationalist mythologies, every particular ethnicity seems to have exercised a certain dose of hegemony or collective sadism over others. It is said to have been built on such insupportable ground that it was bound to collapse. Readers unaffected by such imperative oblivion can recognize common denominators of their past life in Jergović’s private histories. His narratives, therefore, perform an act of mourning, ultimately necessary for the creation of a healthy and safe historical distance from which an objective version of the country’s history can finally emerge. Such a stance may be similar to that which Slavoj Žižek recognizes in the persistence of the so-called Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the East, in recent German film production. It is not nostalgia for life under the Stasi threat, but much more a process of “detraumatization” and “parting” from the former system.64 The process is indispensable not only for the acquisition of a healthy perspective vis-a-vis the subject’s former existence but also for the establishment of a new historical origin.

Collective Responsibility for the Crime Although Jergović never discloses the culprit in the murder of the little Roma girl, the spotlight falls on the two perhaps least suspicious protagonists, apparently with no motive to commit the crime: Svjetlan Andrassy and Toma Wacha, both employees of an international NGO and, allegedly, forever on the frontlines of the struggle for the rights of immigrants and other socially dispossessed subjects. Like all the protagonists and suspects in the murder, they themselves are immigrants from elsewhere and harbor an aggressive urge to assimilate to the new Croatian urban texture—Toma realizes with a start that what he likes best about his own children is the fact that they can all claim Croatian citizenship by birth. Both men get into the spotlight when, for a very brief period, the girl’s unclaimed corpse becomes the focal point of the Croatian media. However, after a few rallying cries— “We all are Srda Kapurova” —and the protestations of a few NGOs and local activists, her case again falls into oblivion. The (dis)interest with which both her body and what she stands for are treated in public betrays a Eurocentric paradigm, which with mesmerized passivity directs its gaze to the colorful

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spread of other cultures, extolling their “diversity” and “originality,” yet strongly objects to their “infiltration” into Europe.65 Jergović’s placing of Toma and Svjetlan in foreign agencies, the likes of which have mushroomed since the end of socialism, is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the army of foreign advisors, humanitarians, experts, and other do-gooders who have made careers and fortunes on the Yugoslav and similar catastrophes and who have a vested interest in the continuation of social instability. That it would be the two of them whose homoerotic relationship is safeguarded by the girl’s murder also speaks about local xenophobic suspicion of everything “imported” and “alien” to the Croatian national being: immigrants, ideologies, homosexuals, and humanitarians alike. Defined by the attributes of a body that evolves “naturally,” and where an ethnos exists in full confidence of the inviolability of its culture, language, and the boundaries of its territorial sovereignty, a nation can only feel secure within the limits of a fully defined nation-state. Yet it is in this discourse that expounds on the importance of the reinforcement of monolithic nationalisms for the sake of world peace that Slavoj Žižek perceptively uncovers remnants of ancient racist rhetoric that he tags “postmodern.” According to Žižek, this form of racism, which is not new but has only modified its jingoist repertory, is not direct anymore but is instead “reflected,” in the sense that it can even “assume the form of its opposite, of the fight against racism.”66 Pointing the finger at contemporary cosmopolitan and multicultural society, the “postmodern” racist deplores the fact that “in the contemporary Babylon the experience of belonging to a well-defined ethnic community, which gives meaning to the individual’s life, is losing ground. . . . In short, the true culprits are cosmopolitan universalists who, in the name of ‘multiculturalism,’ mix races and thereby set in motion natural self-defense mechanisms.”67 However, in Jergović’s new Croatia this paradigm gets slightly modified, although its racist imaginary remains virtually unchanged. While during the 1990s the sieges and bombardments of the cities of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo were regularly blamed on “Balkan barbarians”—Serbian and Montenegrin peasants from the surrounding villages, who bred irrational hatred for the city as a space of cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity, and tolerance— in the new postwar period of diplomatic normalization in the region, such Euro-centric discourse has been substituted by an explanation that bypasses the by now discredited nationalist paradigm, offensive to the new sovereign neighbor states. Instead the new-old barbarians and culprits both for the wars but also for the chaotic state of the corrupt nation-statelets are no longer ethnic minority pathogens (Serbs in Croatia, Albanians in Kosovo, or Bosnians in Slovenia), but rather a multiplicity of de-ethnicized albeit The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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cultural or class opponents (Croatian peasants and refugees in Zagreb, Serbs from the provinces in Belgrade, immigrants and Roma everywhere), who are inassimilable to the urban/European cultural model claimed by each of the ex-Yugoslav ethnic nations.68 Such sharp juxtaposition of the urban/ cosmopolitan/pacifist and rural/isolationist/aggressive idioms also helps to create a common ground of civic identity in substitution for the antecedent ethnoreligious one.69 Jergović’s novel suggests the insidious logic by which the exclusionary politics of Croatianness, directed at anybody who could be defined by different parameters, operates at a level at which racial or ethnic difference and sexual orientation are identified as part of a conspiracy against the healthy national being. In communities suffering from identity crisis, virtually any idea that runs against the policies of the discrimination of difference is broadly and without any rationale interpreted as “alien” to the communal spirit and as having been “imported” with the aim of annihilating the rather vaguely defined qualities that the collective imaginary utilizes as its social adhesives. What follows from the closing pages of the novel is a twofold conclusion, threading a very fragile ground. A minor detail of an initialed umbrella forgotten beside the girl’s strangled body sends Inspector Lovro on the trail of the two distinguished public figures’ homosexual relationship as a clue to the murder. When his attempt at uncovering the murderers backfires in the car accident, Toma is on his way to meet Svjetlan in order to show him a handful of photographs of his tailor grandfather dressed in drag on his deathbed. Due to the novel’s inconclusive ending, it is impossible to determine whether Srda is the victim of the suggested homoerotic anxiety of the two socially rising mimic Croatians, trying to assimilate at any cost, or whether the very indication of such a connection originates in Lovro’s homophobic mind, in his equally unstable almostCroatianness.70 Ultimately, however, the girl may be a collateral victim of multiple protagonists’ conflicting interests, desires, and mysterious dealings. Despite an incredible array of vivid characters in the novel, in Jergović’s Croatia Yugoslav Croatian urban elites seem almost extinct and the Croatian capital inhabited almost exclusively by newcomers, migrants, refugees, and foreigners. Jergović’s city definitely is the ultimate multicultural site, although without the native elites contributing to intellectual sophistication; what remains of usual urban attributes is merely the “multi-,” and “cosmo-,” while “-culturalism” and “-politanism” seem irretrievably lost. The girl’s body inescapably enters a broader context, the context of body politics. A dead body needs to be controlled from the outside, as its material transformation renders any internal control impossible, and it must be promptly and properly taken care of. Liv Nilsson Stutz reminds us of bodies’

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materiality, which becomes most evident at the moment of death, “when the embodied social being is transformed into a cadaver, continuously in a state of transformation due to the process of putrefaction and decomposition. In this transition, the unity of the mindful body and the embodied mind breaks down, and cultural and social control over the body can no longer be exercised from within, but instead has to be imposed from the outside.”71 A “cadaver is never neutral [or] ignored,” and if unclaimed and exposed, the dead body creates a social crisis that lasts for the duration of its unclaimed state.72 While the girl’s dead body lies in the morgue, her murderer unknown to the authorities and the public utterly unfazed by the whole affair, the novel unravels a multitude of social pathologies, criminal histories, and unexpected conspiratorial alliances among the protagonists. It seems that the very crisis of the girl’s unclaimed corpse causes a whole spectrum of dirt to float into the open. For this reason the strangled Roma girl turns into a poignant symbol in the novel. Nobody knows a single detail about her. No protagonist demonstrates any genuine interest in the girl herself; she is simply a metaphor for the social cataclysm in post-Yugoslav transitional societies. Her dead body is likewise symbolic of the transitions of postcommunist Europe, in which the definition of inside/outside boundaries becomes increasingly important yet ever more impossible.73 Hemon and Jergović are equally interested in disclosing symptoms of their protagonists’ more profound refusal to acknowledge the prehistory of the Yugoslav war but also the generational defeat in the face of the tragedy, clearly signposted by political and social developments. A broader issue in their narratives has to do with both personal and collective responsibility for history, as well as the self-indulgent blindness of an entire generation of intellectuals to the social problems already emphasized by a multitude of writers, filmmakers, and other critical minds. Failure to acknowledge the past and learn to interpret it is a recurrent motif in these texts. Hemon illustrates this defeatist position by a brilliant sketch that at first seems not to have a particular connection with the rest of the novel: an Eastern European protagonist who studies English for immigrants in the same class as Pronek demonstrates a strange obsession with the past-perfect tense. He keeps using it as if his life depended on it—far too often and without linguistic justification. In a manner reminiscent of this fixation on the past perfect, all that the reader ever learns about Pronek’s life is his past perfect, while any details of note in his more immediate past—the acknowledgment of the war in Bosnia and his own opinion or feelings about it—are repressed. Not even during his stay in Ukraine in the summer of 1991, when the war was already raging in Croatia, and Jozef left Bosnia as a matter of precaution, does the war become The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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a significant factor in the narrative or get mentioned in more than a vaguely sketchy manner. Likewise, the father of his Ukrainian friend-narrator, Victor Plavchuk, inhabits his own past perfect to the detriment of his family, poisoning his sons with his macho heroic stories of Ukrainian nationalist resistance and their standoff against communists. This apparently insignificant detail interprets the whole nation’s obsession with its own “past perfect” of dubious traditions, false mythologies, and the fabricated grievances that each ethnoreligious group in Yugoslavia used as a pretext for its own isolationist agenda. All this is indicative of a state of almost willful ignorance in the face of history of not only one whole generation but the entire nation. Miljenko Jergović, on the other hand, digs deep into the past perfect of his protagonists, who are conveniently hiding in their present tense, eager to repress the ugliness of the distant past or any connections it may have to their lives. What Jergović seems to be concerned with is the crime itself, the nature of the crime, not the perpetrators, who, in spite of their national and religious colors or individual destinies, are all look-alikes suffering from the same anxieties and responding to the herd call of history in disturbing ways, apparently unaware of their individual responsibility. They justify their abrupt transformation by circumstantial evidence and the fact that they were simply doing what everybody else did. These Mitläufer in the madness erupting around them, and endorsed by thousands like them, minded their own business at the most unusual of times, trying to live through yet another episode of history unscathed.74 They are all simply human and interchangeable but equally responsible witnesses of history, who will be in permanent denial of that responsibility. The dead body of the little immigrant is a poignant symbol nonetheless. This female corpse edified into the structure of imaginary Croatian nationhood is defined as an illegal “alien” and permanently unacknowledged by the community that kills her. Jergović’s text depicts the victim as a refugee from poverty and persecution, whose sojourn in the host community is as administratively illegal as it is socially undesired. Nameless and paperless, this “postmodern” victim is utterly devoid of the aura of the sacred that a victim of a ritual sacrifice holds, while her body remains literally frozen in ethical and legal limbo, unclaimed and equally unwanted in both her home and host countries. What she embodies in the paradigm of a new homogenized community is the looming masses of similar alien bodies threatening the precarious exclusivity of a privileged social order. The girl’s corpse signifies a vacuum that was created by her death but that within itself carries unlimited opportunity, as a vacuum is not only a void in which nothing happens but



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also a space of absolute possibility, an empty space whose existence is essential in the creation of the next community, which will be new and different, regardless of its nature.75 Finally, what does all this have to do with the former Yugoslavia? Everything and nothing, to the same degree, as much as Jergović’s protagonists have everything and nothing to do with the murder of the little girl. However, the girl’s forgotten dead body is a distinct metaphor for the country destroyed after symbolic and impotent protestations, reminiscent of the few conscientious objectors’ interest in the cause of death of the little immigrant. I would like to go back to two suggestions I previously made: of the body metaphor employed in the political sense and of the claim that the social crisis persists for the duration of the corpse’s undisposed state. Both suggest that a body, and a dead body even more so, can never be a neutral metaphor. The corpse of Jergović’s murdered girl thus conveys an overload of meaning. Her murderers could be everybody and anybody: ordinary people with an acute identity crisis, school dropouts turned hardened rapists and murderers, police inspectors with tainted family history, politically opportunistic NGO officials, upstart businessmen, or a next-door neighbor who politely greets fellow riders in the elevator every morning. Some took an active part in the carnage; some did not. Yet the narrative considers none of the protagonists of the collective tragedy, not even the perpetrators of beatings and murders, as individually motivated to commit atrocities. Instead evil is portrayed as a social phenomenon that overtakes and implicates individuals, a collective madness in which they themselves are unthinking executioners of orders whose source, meaning, and goal they neither comprehend nor ever interrogate. The fact that the perpetrator could be literally any of “us” is thus even more disturbing for the lack of any clearly recognizable stigma under which evil resides. Answering her own rhetorical question “What Are Monsters For?,” about atrocities committed in the Bosnian war, Slavenka Drakulić says: “Worse than identifying a killer is identifying his ordinariness, a fact that it could have been any of us—we were just not in the same situation. That is what the monsters are for too: so we can wash our own bloody hands.”76 It is this unquestioning participation and collective collusion that emerges as the elemental problem in these two novels. Each and every one of them/us did what they/we thought was best to survive the pandemonium that started somehow of its own volition and without our participation or even conscious acknowledgment of what was going on. Are those of them/us who did not participate but who acted as unwilling witnesses exculpated of responsibility before history, or are they/we, for some twisted reason, equally The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis

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culpable? Jergović’s novel is in equal proportions merciless to those of them/ us who continued with their daily existence while the murder was taking place next door. The question of who killed Srda Kapurova is almost a rhetorical one at this point. The perpetrators are unknown and insignificant. And so they will remain as long as all of them/us reject a share in the crime and believe that the investigation of the murder is somebody else’s business. Meanwhile, chaos and social crisis continue for as long as the repression of the truth of the crime, and acknowledgment of the unburied corpse, remain outside the realm of moral accountability.



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Chapter 5 Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

Literature’s fascination with History (capital letter intended), the relationship that treats history as a metacognitive force existing outside of human influence and imparting its deadly blows upon us with divine disinterestedness, is a common trope. Much has been written about the awe with which humans, individuals and collectives alike, await these devastating blows and their helplessness in the face of history. Modernism tends to rewrite it as the individual’s “problem with history,” the subject’s valiant struggle as a failure marked with Sisyphean pathos. Not even the postmodern proverbial “playfulness” in the vision of history as a backdrop for many a convoluted individual (his)tory can obscure the fearful resignation with which the protagonist awaits the inevitable axe against his neck. If anything can be said about the use of history in the literatures of the Balkans, it is that it is not merely a force to be reckoned with, but one fully determining the course of human lives. Even a brief scan of the material discussed in this book attests to the fact that history has been and remains one of the major concerns, literary and otherwise, whose significance is unabating. And this is the case regardless of whether the individual protagonist’s position on the historical narrative 151

is one of victory and bravery in the face of death, or of an obscene spectacle of carnage shrouded in a jargon of pseudo-values and masquerading as a force outside humanity’s grasp. Despite all mystification, the victim of historical horrors frequently reserves his respect for victims while demonstrating more than an irreverent attitude toward history and the almost divine disinterestedness with which it sacrifices bodies and humanity itself. When Foucault proposed a genealogical study of history, he did not suggest a study of history per se, but instead an in-depth process of uncovering the imprints that history makes on the body. Genealogical study places the body in the center of interest and demystifies the overwhelming force of history itself. The body becomes “the inscribed surface of events” and “a volume in perpetual disintegration,” on which history writes its narrative. It “manifests the stigmata of past experience” and is in a constant process of disintegration that consequently prevents the construction of a coherent body of truth/history/knowledge. The ultimate task of genealogy, therefore, is to “expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.”1 Some of this fateful connectedness between history and the body is present in Lacanian structuralism, which creates the foundations of both culture and history on the fully deterministic existence of the letter. The body is thus already inscribed with the historical text, and it can do little but follow and fulfill this inscription: “And the subject, while he may appear to be the slave of language, is still more the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name. Reference to the experience of the community as the substance of this discourse resolves nothing. For this experience takes on its essential dimension in the tradition established by this discourse. This tradition, long before the drama of history is inscribed in it, grounds the elementary structures of culture.”2 History, tradition, and culture exist as a superstructure to the overdeterministic discourse, while restrictive communal dictates (and sacrifices) look likewise like more of a command by an outside force (villa, big Other) than a decision made by the community. Every- and anybody is merely a surface that records the historical narrative and acts upon its prompts. Individuals seem to have no agency in the process and merely exist within the strictly posited boundaries of a text written outside and in spite of them. Community that arises on the sacrifice of such a body is equally impotent in the face of its own historical destiny, and it reiterates ad infinitum this same law/letter that is stamped in its foundations but that it did nothing to shape or transform. If a collectivity cannot be the master of its existence, how can an individual expect to become a free subject outside of such a limiting and already prescribed genetic code?

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If victimhood and thus sacrifice to the dictum of history are already prescribed by what precedes the event of victimization, what resistance can the victim of trauma demonstrate in the face of its already guaranteed horror? Silence about trauma emerges as a common form of resistance, if indeed it can be defined as resistance to begin with. The victim of historical trauma frequently sinks into silence and refuses to relate her traumatic experience in language, which according to Lacan is already inscribed in and acts as an agent of that very trauma. Regardless of whether the reason for such silent treatment of the past lies in deeply personal matters (the guilt of survivors, for example) or whether silence may be induced by a socially issued taboo on conveying the experience, the silent victim of history is forced into a state that both negates and precedes language and history as such. The witness finds herself comparable to a desubjectivized individual who is unable to “speak” herself into existence in the given sociosymbolic framework.3 Many practitioners of psychoanalysis emphasize that a crucial step in healing is the creation of a “narrative” about the traumatic past experience, and “narrative” means “sharing one’s story in a supportive environment.”4 Although trauma cannot be eliminated from memory, its verbalization could effectuate its exteriorization to the level where it will cause less damage: “Massive trauma precludes its registration. . . . To undo this entrapment in a fate that cannot be known, cannot be told, but can only be repeated, a therapeutic process—a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially of re-externalizing the event—has to be set in motion. This . . . can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story.”5 Creating a narrative about a traumatic experience, therefore, is expected to be a therapeutically effective way of preventing its permanent repression into an unrecognizable core from which it will endlessly return in ever more threatening forms. An invitation is extended to the subject to narrate her traumatic past in the very language located in the foundations of the social structure that inflicted the trauma on the subject. Needless to say then that while the talking cure can be seen as an important step in the process of normativizing the subject in the post-traumatic phase, it is even more important for the undisturbed functioning of the system. By allegedly liberating the individual from her traumatic experience, the language simultaneously normalizes that very trauma and, moreover, requires that the victim continue functioning within the same structure (communal, cultural, historical) that originally inflicted the trauma upon her. Such a paradox can hardly go unnoticed by the victim, even if only at the intuitive level, and as such this paradox inevitably shapes the victim’s relationship to her/his trauma and to the dread of history, simultaneously precluding any viable resolution to this crisis. Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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Two relatively recent novels, Bait (1996), by David Albahari, and Interrogation (2008), by Elias Maglinis, demonstrate acute awareness of this paradox of the victim’s impossible confrontation with history through language. Both problematize the idea of an open dialogue about the past as alleviating the influence of the traumatic repetition of history on individual and collective psychologies and suggest alternative and nonverbal strategies of dealing with the past. Each novel is set within a family circle in which creative children pursue their parents’ acquiescence to speak of their past trauma in order to transform their narratives of suffering into art and realize themselves as creative but also individual subjects. Their pronounced iconoclasm targets equally the confines of familial and cultural determinism and the conventions of art, and they seem on the verge of a strategic chance at individual self-realization. Concise and situated in the contemporary moment, these texts focus on the tension that reflects generational differences, trauma that behaves like a hereditary disorder, and the blame game on account of missed opportunities, concentrated along family trajectories. Albahari’s nameless narrator recreates the past through his mother’s memory of World War II persecutions, which he records on a set of oldfashioned audiotapes and takes with him to the destination of his self-exile as his only record of and link with his previous life. The protagonist of Bait leaves his native Serbia for Canada in an act of self-imposed exile, apparently in reaction to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Only after his arrival in Canada does he find himself involved in the process of negotiating his identity as a foreigner who still mourns the inevitable loss of the old world he left and to which he does not want to return, but who is equally incapable of integrating himself into his new cultural environment. In this slow-moving narrative he contemplates his exilic ambivalence as a result of the complex interconnectedness of his historical and familial legacies and his relatively indifferent attitude to them. He tries to overcome his own “burden of the past” through a fictional narrative based on his mother’s life. In order to negotiate his position in the new world to which he escaped from a previous existence, the narrator of Bait is at pains to sever the link with his first life, loaded with history, memories, and all the meaning and meaninglessness he hoped to escape through his self-exiling act. Inevitably, this path leads him back to the beginning—to his mother and to the dark desire underlying his attempt to compose a coherent story out of his mother’s life. The past he wants to eradicate is not only the one he lived through but his mother’s as well, as he understands that the germination of his present condition lies deeply embedded within her past. He follows the trajectory of his mother’s life in the audiotapes that he listens to for the first time only a

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decade after her death, once he is already an émigré in Canada. His mother’s testimony, recorded through a long and painful process following his father’s death, connects him to the untold story of his family and acts as a missing link to his Jewish origin and the broader history of his now fragmented country. Through his mother’s taped testimony the narrator seeks to fill in the lacunae in his own memory and bridge the gap that separates him from a more holistic understanding of his own situation. In the same instant, however, her story is also a catalyst for his historically burdened past, his national and religious identity, all unified in and symbolized by the figure of the mother. No matter how much he claims that the narrative he is writing pays homage to his mother, it is much more an attempt at his self-liberation, which necessitates that the memory of her and all she represents be laid to rest. The entire novel is a dark, continuous monologue about his existence in limbo, in a state of in-betweenness and nonbelonging, and his inability to write—in the idiom understandable to his acquired culture—and to sacrifice the “mother,” her past, and also part of himself and make himself functional in his adopted culture. This sacrifice is required by his urge to assume a new identity, to resubjectivize himself and inscribe himself in the linguistic and cultural idiom of his chosen home. Throughout this painful introspection the narrator insists that the life of his mother not be interpreted as an allegory for his decomposing country. His anxiety clearly suggests that it is precisely there that the reader should look for the meaning of what he is at such pains to amputate from his life, for the “matricide” that he is trying to commit in order to integrate himself into Western “normalcy.” Perhaps it would not be too far-fetched to say that this novel reflects, if not even mimics, the collective state of almost mesmerized paralysis with which the Serbian nation (and other ex-Yugoslav nations to an equal degree) reacted to the magnitude of the turn-of-the-century dismemberment of Yugoslavia. In the wake of the Yugoslav wars and international punitive campaigns, as well as apparently radical shifts on the domestic political stage, the Serbian nation began a long and painful process of collective self-interrogation.6 In fact, Bait reads like a transcript of this harrowing and much resisted process of self-examination that is imperative for individual and collective mental health. Yet unlike collective introspection, which is rarely self-induced, Bait displays a profound and revealing questioning of an individual caught in historical events whose magnitude threaten his survival, even if certain passages of this confession seem forced out of the narrator rather than given voluntarily. The narrator makes it his project to extricate himself from the repetitive cycle of historical tragedy that afflicted his life in the same way it destroyed his mother’s. Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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It could be said that the novel’s dark mood and the all-pervading sense of death testify as much to the ramifications of the given historical moment as to the difficulty that an individual or a collective faces in making sense of its predicament. In contrast to Albahari’s slow narration, which imperceptibly creeps up the reader’s consciousness until she finds herself trapped inside the dark hopelessness of the narrator’s situation, Elias Maglinis has written a text of powerful visual appeal that aggressively assaults the senses. Maglinis to a degree modeled his protagonist Marina, an aspiring artist looking for her authentic voice, on the Yugoslav performance artist Marina Abramović, whom she worships as her artistic ideal. In this novel that overflows with blood, body mutilation, undigested food, graphic scenes of torture, and uneasy sexual fantasies, Marina embarks on a mission to liberate her father from his nightmarish past as a victim of the Greek military junta, in power between 1967 and 1974. Persecution and suffering seem to be hereditary in Marina’s family, with her communist grandfather tortured, imprisoned, and banished during the civil war of 1946–49, while her father underwent systematic beating and rape in the prisons of the junta. Marina herself appears to be affected by this history of corporeal violation, as from a very early age she demonstrates affinity for bodily harm and self-inflicted pain. Her family is apparently clueless about the causes of this brutal treatment of her own body, her violent outbursts in public, and her alienating performances. Her whole life revolves inside the debilitating cycle of the food and nourishment she rejects, the erratic pattern of her menstrual cycle, and nauseating migraines—a cycle of pain and blood. Both the real and the fictional artist blame these states on an unsettled family situation; Abramović implies that the source of somewhat similar conditions she suffered in her adolescence was her family, especially her commanding and egotistical mother.7 Unlike Abramović, however, who recognizes the social forces behind her grievances and convincingly reacts by directing her angst at them—to the point of nearly losing her life in the process—Marina in Interrogation fails to acknowledge the source of the coercive social discourse behind her suffering and reacts against the family as the sole source of repression, rather than a mere agent of social compulsion.8

The Liberating Promise of Matricide When the narrator of Bait plays the tapes with his mother’s recorded testimony for the first time, they yield nothing but uncomfortable silence lingering in the air between himself and his mother. He is in control of the machine that is ready to rob his mother of her only possession—her life

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story—while she tries to postpone the moment of that ultimate embarrassment. Gradually the reels unwind but fail to yield words. Instead, they recreate for him a living memory of his mother, for what he hears is not her speech but her sounds: her silent crying, sniffing, and other noises reminding him of her movements. These body sounds create in her son a “corporeal memory” of his mother, the most intimate and primordial way to remember.9 With the help of the recovered sounds the son relives the moment when his mother stands up from her chair, when she walks over to the kitchen to prepare coffee, when she steps heavily across the kitchen floor, and when she resumes her seat opposite him. His mother is alive in the sounds and inarticulate noises her body produces while moving in space. As gradually his mother’s fear of uttering her life subsides, her narration begins mapping the space of her exile, which predates and in many ways foreshadows the exile of her son half a century later. Upon marrying a Jew in Croatia at the time the persecutions had already begun, she converts to Judaism, seeking acceptance by his Orthodox Jewish family, and insists on raising their sons as Jews, even though her husband firmly opposes this in the letters he sends from a death camp. After his death, she winds her way through the war-torn country, hoping to reach safety in Serbia and escape from the Croatian Nazi puppet state, in which her double otherness of Serbian origin and Jewishness by choice stigmatizes both her and her children. The geography of her journey simultaneously maps the path of war from Croatia to other parts of the country and ends in southern Serbia. Its description as a descent into the ultimate darkness of war, in which she loses her entire first family, anticipates the Yugoslav dissolution wars of the 1990s that will replay her life and generate the exile of her son. Her account of the war is told in plain words, matter-offactly, and without the emotion or figurative language otherwise characteristic of her speech. Rather than navigating her movements through history via recorded events that shaped the continent during the period of war, she measures history by her own time, by the events that define her, by her losses, and by her two consecutive lives. At the point of the destruction of her first family, the mother’s life “contracts” to nothingness, yet she rises again when she marries a Jewish camp survivor and creates a new family with him. The mother’s language, which her narrator-son remembers as always characterized by the usage of archaic words, proverbs, and traditional wisdom, shifts dramatically in the course of her story. This strategy produces a narrative that, although deeply immersed in and stemming from collective memory, makes a definitive claim for her own right to remember. Bait, along with some of Albahari’s other narratives, reveals a macabre economy of death underneath the politics of family relationships. Several Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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of his novels concerned with recent political events in the former Yugoslavia also feature narrators who exile themselves but do so always and only after the death of a family member, the event that propels them into a new existence. In Mrak (Dark) (1997), a short novel about the hopelessness that engulfs the people of a city very much like Belgrade in the wake of the 1996– 97 antiregime protests, the narrator decides to leave when he learns of his lover’s pregnancy, and he is on the plane immediately after seeing her tied to a chair and butchered by her husband, who then commits suicide in front of the narrator. Tsing (Cink) (1988), on the other hand, is entirely dedicated to the memory of a father whose death uncovers a promise of liberation for the son-narrator:10 “I thought that the blessing of dying might be found in the fact that one finally ceases to be someone’s son: the curtain drops, and for a while one walks as if the whole world belonged to him. It is a terrible feeling which cannot be endured for too long. It is terrible, of course, because it is beautiful, and every beauty is exhausting.”11 In Bait the narrator’s father lingers only as an “absent presence,” and even the son’s taping of the mother’s memories is triggered by his death. Moreover, at the time of the recording the narrator admits to having been “blinded” by his love for his father and his rage at this sudden loss. He leaves the country immediately after his mother’s death, caused by a renewal of ethnic violence in her native Croatia, and a repetition of the history she had once survived. The speed with which the narrator of Bait deals with the material remainders of his family life is indicative of his desire to discard every trace of the past as effectively as possible. He exhibits no sentimentality for his parents’ property, left in his possession after their death. Almost a decade after his father’s departure, his mother still holds on to all his possessions, with which she has surrounded herself, recreating in that way a palpable memory of her husband. Only days after her death, and before hastily leaving for Canada, her son disposes of both their belongings, until nothing remains that could physically remind him of his parents. Through the exiling act he absents himself from participation in the national tragedy, and once in Canada he attempts to absent himself from his native language, to “cut the maternal source of words” and thus erase himself from the history and past of his native land.12 Ironically, the very moment he rediscovers himself in his Jewish origins and rediscovers his family history through the agency of his mother’s voice, he is in a hurry to lose himself to a foreign language and an ahistorical existence. The language is the first obstacle to successful assimilation: it is the “bait” from the novel’s title and is inextricably connected to his mother and all she represents.13 His decision to leave the past behind and deliberately “kill” his native language is motivated by his instinct toward a speedy entrance into the symbolic of his host culture.

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Moreover, the eradication of his mother tongue, and an equally forceful renunciation of his identity and personal/family and collective/national history, represents a symbolic sacrifice of parental authority. His assimilationist urge seems to necessitate the death of both his language and his past and condemns him to forced silence until he is unable to speak in either language available. In the end he feels that he can no longer express himself in English, yet he has lost the sound and feeling for his mother tongue: “the whole time I was tormented by the fear that a return to my native language, reinforced by the fact that it was precisely my mother who was speaking it, would bring me back to where I no longer wanted to return, especially now that, thanks to someone else’s language I was finally beginning to feel like someone else.”14 He finds himself in a situation in which he utilizes no language at all, but in order to recognize himself as something, as someone, he tries to compose his first narrative in English. Thus the mother’s life story emerges as twice mediated: first by being spoken into her son’s tape recorder and then by his written interpretation for a foreign audience. The ultimate moment of crisis arrives when his manuscript is rejected by Donald, his Canadian writer “friend” who is his (imagined or real) interlocutor, with whom he is juxtaposed and whom he essentially strips of dimensional complexity to the point of caricature. Justifying his rejection by the lack of “authenticity” that the story exhibits, Donald in fact quotes the audiences’ tastes in pathetic stories about victims of brutality that always happen elsewhere. The narrator’s situation of a total absence of paternal authority, save for the memory of the father, emasculated by his concentration camp experience, and his linguistic dilemma place him in an almost semiotic situation. He can be reinvented as a subject should he successfully perform symbolic matricide and thus finalize his assimilation into the Canadian citizen code. Our narrator therefore behaves very much like Kristeva’s “foreigners,” who are, according to her more recent work, required to shed the skin of their old identity in order to adjust themselves to a new life. For the process of assimilation to succeed, Kristeva’s immigrants (for she solely considers non-Western arrivals to the West in her paradigm) need to commit the matricide required of them by the new law and the Western symbolic. Without this ultimate sacrifice their subjectivation remains incomplete, and foreigners remain in some kind of pre-Oedipal existence, forever badly integrated and always in (violent) confrontation with the benevolent yet rigid Western Father. Such an approach emerges as slavishly Eurocentric and contradicts Kristeva’s earlier work on the process of subjectivation on numerous points.15 Without entering the debate on whether assimilation or integration of foreigners is the way to go in any society, we may ask why it seems necessary for a (non-Western) foreigner Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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to sacrifice his “mother” before entering the new (Western) society, if he has already been made a proper subject in his own language and society. Why not talk about a symbolic parricide, through which the foreigner replaces the original language/father’s law with the new one, unless foreigners are denied the very membership in their own father’s symbolic because there is no such concept outside the West? The foreigner’s (father’s) language is not conducive to knowledge of the law and verbal (nonviolent) resolution of conflict; in fact, it is not even a language, but inarticulate babble that Kristeva long ago defined as the semiotic realm and a maternal sphere. Or, to further extend this speculative exercise, perhaps the non-Western father is always necessarily emasculated and without authority (or absent, as in Bait), so that his sons and daughters are taught social norms only once they find themselves in the West. This is why Kristeva does not see foreigners’ integration in the West as a kind of resubjectivation, but instead as subjectivation proper. The foreigner must abject his commanding mother in order to become the good subject under the Western father’s law. Without this symbolic matricide, which is not always successful, the foreigner effectively exists in a preverbal, inarticulate, and hysterical condition, regardless of whether he inhabits a space in the West or beyond. Unable to communicate and make himself understood (by the Western subject), the foreigner remains outside of social radars, thus invisible and potentially dangerous. It is not clear, therefore, what kind of resolution the narrator makes in the final lines of the novel, in which he wavers under the failure of his attempt to kill the memory of his mother in himself and forever silence her voice and her compelling narrative. After having his manuscript rejected by Donald, he takes crablike steps in the darkness that envelops him, until he feels “something hard” hitting against his back and his dangerously undermined confidence. Characteristically, the text does not disclose what offers the safety he seeks, and we are free to locate it in his linguistic identity or indeed in any predefined concept regardless of its fictitiousness. Despite the physical and philosophical distance he tries to keep from all identifiers, his life too closely retraces the path already lived by his mother to leave any plausible options for escape. The “something hard” against his back can therefore either offer some kind of solid support to his wavering ego or, alternatively, corner him even further in a trap with no escape route.

Bleeding into the Void Few have demonstrated the circumscription of the body by history so graphically as Marina Abramović, who throughout her long career exhibited ritual victimization of the body in many of her performance acts, especially

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Figure 5.1. Rhythm 5. Courtesy of Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

those dedicated to her Yugoslav years. Abramović’s body spectacles always address her deepest fears and test the limits of physical endurance, yet they are rarely free from the ideological dimension that lurks in the background and that has, she insists, thoroughly determined her life. Her performances leave little doubt that the ideological universe is always a combination of the familial and the public and that one is never isolated from the other.16 Two of her early performances that firmly establish the human body as a sacrifice to a collective/communal/political ideal by means of a permanent inscription of biography and history on the body are Rhythm 5 and The Lips of Thomas.17 Rhythm 5 consisted of Abramović cutting her hair and nails and throwing them into a mix of woodchips arranged in a wooden frame shaped into a five-pointed star, the symbol of socialist Tito’s Yugoslavia and the centerpiece of the country’s flag. She set it on fire and lay in its center. It took a doctor in the audience to understand that after some time she had fallen unconscious in the smoke and was in danger of asphyxiating. She was carried out by audience members. In The Lips of Thomas she used a razor blade to cut a five-pointed star across her belly, whipped herself, lay down on a cross-shaped block of ice, and bled profusely.18 Here is the text of the performance instructions, given in the characteristic Abramović style:

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LIPS OF THOMAS Performance

I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon.



I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass.



I break the glass with my right hand.



I cut a five pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade.



I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain.



I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks.

.

The heat of a suspended space heater pointed at my stomach causes the cut star to bleed.

The rest of my body begins to freeze.

I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the audience interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath. Duration: 2 hours, 1975, Krinzinger Gallery, Innsbruck.19

Recurring symbols in her performances, especially in The Lips of Thomas (like the five-pointed star or the cross), emphatically indicate the sacrifice of the subject to virtually every social/communal enterprise. All of them emerge as equally ideological, regardless of whether they occupy the position of “state” ideologies or not.20 Besides the obvious symbolic of the fivepointed star, with which Abramović suggests her own embeddedness in the structure of Yugoslav “communism,” as she insists on calling it, she loaded the act with other, mostly autobiographical but nonetheless ideological symbolism: the cross, possibly suggesting her “martyrdom” to state ideology but potentially even more so her descent from the Serbian Orthodox Church patriarch, allegedly murdered in 1937 on political grounds. The Orthodox Church in this case represents an antagonistic yet nevertheless parallel ideological universe to that of the politics of both Yugoslav states: Tito’s socialist rule as much as prewar monarchic autocracy. Finally, the excessive, almost sickening quantities of honey and wine—consumed, no less, with a silver spoon and out of a crystal vessel—as well as the whip and blood, convey the hedonism attached to the upper social echelons (her parents as part of the communist regime) but also an overload of sensations and clear masochistic pleasure in this act of sacrificial submission to the ideological symbolic. Despite the fact that the symbolism of this performance emerges from Abramović’s own biography and family mythology, it is a clear identifier for multitudes, demonstrating that the personal initiation ritual is always and necessarily only a fragment of the collective one.21 The performance insists

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Figure 5.2. Lips of Thomas. Courtesy of Marina Abramović.

on the interplay between the historical and personal universes in the creation of the autobiographical narrative. One can imagine the artist almost pathetically surrounding herself with objects of personal value, building a secure enclosure that should keep her relatively safe against what she strives to exclude from that space. The usage of personal objects in her performances presents a considerable modification of her initial open confrontation with ideology in Rhythm 5, in which she daringly lay inside the recreated symbol of the regime. The individual struggles for her own space that is free of collective ideologies and rituals, yet what she achieves is only to clear an area in which she can to some extent realize herself. Where Abramović carves her belly with the state insignia that brands her through the complex engagement of her family with the symbol and the regime itself, Marina of Interrogation tattoos her back with the words “Honor Thy Parents,” using a torture device straight out of Kafka’s Penal Colony. Marina’s body is profoundly affected by something that is beyond her comprehension, as she intentionally exposes herself to repeated episodes of bodily harm. She shamelessly denudes her family legacy and slashes her body open in protest at her father’s silence and passivity in the face of his traumatic past. Reiterative allusions to Kafka and the ambiguous relationship he had with his own father in Marina’s performances mingle with political and historical references or with acts of body profanation and perversion. Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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Figure 5.3. Lips of Thomas. Courtesy of Marina Abramović.

A line from Kafka’s letter to his father, “so you suffered, and so we suffered,” becomes the motto of her artistic work and also of the closed circle of the historical and private trauma of both her family and the Greek nation.22 Like the narrator of Bait, Marina insists on hearing the account of her father’s life from Kostis himself, something that he adamantly refuses to convey. She aims at producing a performance based on his victimization. What characterizes self-mutilation as art? asks Renata Salecl, who proposes as an answer the disintegration of the traditional social network (the patriarchal family) and, as a result, the changed way in which the subject identifies with the symbolic law: “The law is linked to the role of the father; and in taking a position against this law; that is, by distancing him or herself from this law, the modern subject acquires her or his ‘freedom.’” What therefore constitutes these acts of willing body mutilation, regardless of whether the subject targets this or that particular agent of social compulsion or whether the act is performed in public or in private, is the apparent disappearance for the performing subject of the totality of the authority of the big Other, “the total disbelief in the power of the symbolic order.”23 However, Salecl claims, the penetration of the integrity of one’s own body does not originate solely from the subject’s realization that the absolute authority/ big Other has vanished; it is much more a reaction to the “betrayal” of the subject by the authority. The body is open and bleeding in an attempt at a

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Figure 5.4. 7 Easy Pieces/Lips of Thomas. Courtesy of Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

direct and unmediated communication with the big Other, an exchange that bypasses the entire rigid symbolic network and demands answers from the authority.24 Body slashing, bleeding, and other painful interventions, therefore, are not actions celebrating one’s liberation and freedom from authority, but quite the contrary, an anguished statement about the yearning to gain access to the sacred or to reestablish it and its authority over the individual’s shattered universe.25 Ultimately, the title of Abramović’s performance The Lips of Thomas, referring back to Thomas Aquinas’s proposition that God should not be praised with one’s lips, likewise suggests both the tension between the individual and the big Other’s authority and the fact that there are other, arguably more effective ways of approaching and even criticizing that authority than by enunciation. Marina of Interrogation stages her public exhibitions in reaction to an Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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absence of authoritative influence in her family. Her father is metaphorically rid of his phallic power by the torture he was subjected to, while her mother, Rhea, is absent for the greater part of the narrative and mainly serves the function of the “absent presence,” which when invoked merely affirms the suspicion of the father’s already interrogated masculinity. Rhea’s body begins to disintegrate amid the dissolution of her marriage, with the divorce from Marina’s father in the final stages. Both her physical presence and her parental authority crumble, together with any chance of redemption of their family life. Rhea’s death generates little more than the sensation of healthy voracious hunger in Marina, as if the mother’s departure activated the mother-nourishment mechanism. In a move that is reminiscent of Bait’s narrator’s sudden instinct to record something of family history following his father’s death, Marina makes a series of photos of her mother’s body only minutes after she is confirmed dead.26 While she maniacally swirls around the room taking one photo after the next, which she later displays in an exhibition, her father, deeply disturbed by this madness, recreates in his mind scenes of their married life from the scars and marks on Rhea’s body. However, the parent with whom Marina obviously identifies is her father, and her methods of inquiry into his past and his family legacy are as intrusive of the privacy and silence behind which he has been hiding all her life as they are disrespectful of what she thinks are his salon leftist sympathies: “I want to know, dad. That’s all. And I want you to finally stand up and let it all out.” “Marina, do you understand what you are doing?” “Yes, I’m trying to help you heal. . . . I’ve been asking you questions all my life, trying to talk to you, and you’ve never given me a direct answer to anything. You just don’t answer; you never answered anything. You know something? Grandpa would have talked to me, dad. Grandpa would have talked. Grandpa had guts. I’m really sorry I never got to meet him. Unlike you, grandpa actually had balls.”27

In her demands that her father speak openly about what was done to him, Marina also expects an answer that could liberate her, a response to what was done to her, what they did to her. Her brazen provocations invade his privacy to the point of questioning more than his patriarchal authority—they interrogate his masculine performance as well. In fact, she sees herself and the seemingly quiet and undisturbed family existence they performed together like a smokescreen against exposure to the outside world. At times she not only suggests her father’s impotence and her own incestuous desire but just barely hints that some kind of sexual abuse may have taken place during her

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childhood. All these sexual tensions blend with her voyeuristic fantasy of the abuse Kostis survived at the hands of state executors and her own sexual experimentation: “Sometimes, while I’m fucking, out of the corner of my eye, I think I see you watching me from the corner of the bed, like back then, when I was a little girl and you used to wake from your nightmares and come into my room and. . . I’ve often asked myself what would have gone through my head if I had been present when they beat you, when they . . . ”28 There is certainly some underlying sexual tension in her pressure on Kostis to disclose every intimate detail of the torture he survived in prison, particularly the part he is most anxious not to utter. With her mother departed, Marina stages recurrent episodes of painful self-mutilating masturbation in her father’s home, leaving the door deliberately unsecured against her father’s accidental disruption, of which Kostis is fully aware. It all combines into a long and violently oversexualized nightmare in which the whole family seems to partake. The pivotal role played by the family structure in the perpetuation of the ideological universe is what Kaja Silverman names the “dominant fiction,” defined as the belief in the “unity of the family and the adequacy of the male subject.”29 This privileging of gender as the site of subjectivation over other subjectivating practices further reiterates the ideological normativity of masculinity that can only be sustained by collective belief. Such primacy of the fictionalized phallic ideology is especially evident in Interrogation. In her public appearances, as much as in the interrogation that she conducts about Kostis’s past, Marina keeps challenging her father’s authority and the authority vested in the family in general. She doubts his masculinity and his ability to both sexually please a woman and produce male offspring, which is a recurrent theme in her incestuous nightmares. Unlike the narrator in Bait, whose insistence results in his mother’s narrative of her life’s tragedy, Marina’s “interrogation” fails as her father refuses to cooperate. All she succeeds in doing is forcing him to confirm the prompts she has learned from witness accounts at trials of junta torturers. The confession he is expected to give has already been narrated by others: “Dad, did they use electric shock on you? . . . “Well, they certainly used falanga on you. That’s why your circulation is completely fucked. That’s why your feet swell like that. . . . “What was ‘tea party with toast’? . . . “One of the witnesses says right there, ‘At EAT someone in blue swimming trunks was shouting in the corridor, “Today I’m going to f . . . a captain.”’ I like the dots. What does that mean?”30

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identification with the patrilineal family, her father and her paternal grandfather, who lost much of their lives to persecution and torture by right-wing regimes and stand in contrast to Rhea’s bourgeois family legacy. Rhea’s death clears the space for Marina to try to understand her father and to investigate the causes of his failed paternal and masculine authority. Yet in her dangerous interrogation of her father, in which she tries to make him utter his trauma and his shame, Marina only discovers that she herself is unable to depart from the confines of repetitive family/historical trauma.

The Real of Institutional Repression As a very uneasy subject, male rape is rarely discussed in trials even by the survivors of torture, only a small minority of whom ever admit to the fact of being raped, preferring to keep that ultimate ignominy private.31 However, as Kostis concedes only to himself, “he had forgotten that once upon a time he had gone to the jungle with Tarzan. But his body hadn’t.”32 In fact, of all the torture he went through, the rape seems to have left the most profound impact not only on Kostis’s psyche but also on the way his family perceives him—or at least on the way he projects his own humiliation on his wife and daughter, fearing that they both constantly question his masculinity. Indeed, Marina’s interest in Kostis’s confession does not go far from the sexual aspect of the torture that he and others like him underwent. Ultimately she seems unable to reflect on the psychological and social consequences of her father’s trauma and the circumstances under which it was inflicted. She utilizes published trial proceedings, with which she interrogates her father, to produce an obscene spectacle that in Kostis’s opinion prostitutes both the memory and the suffering of the victims. Brutal violation of female bodies in cases of organized rape and forced impregnation (we should refrain from designating it “sexual violence,” as this obviously has nothing to do with sex) is not directed against women as individuals but at inflicting collective shame on an entire ethnoreligious group. The woman’s objectified body is aggressively assaulted for the sake of humiliation, and perhaps even “contamination,” by forced impregnation of the male group to which she “belongs” (the rape of individual women is commonly considered “revenge” against her male relative[s]). Since every erotic aspect of this criminal enterprise is clearly absent, it will not be the subject of men bragging among themselves about their sexual pursuits. As Julie Mostov notices, “such exploits have no place in the ideas of masculinity and femininity promoted as desirable national models and serve a special and limited purpose tightly linked to military recruitment. The reality of sexual aggression and sexual violence is not part of this ideal picture. The

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Other’s men are perpetrators of violence against ‘our’ women. It is this violence against ‘our’ women as members of the collective nation that elicits the ethnocrats’ concern.”33 However, as any sexual activity poorly fits the profile of the heroic warrior, details of this kind do not find a place in the glorification of young men sent to fight and die for their country/nation/faith or any other abstract concept. Such notions are instead commonly assumed to be part and parcel of man’s proven masculinity. The rape of male bodies, on the contrary, is intriguing both from the point of homosocial economy, which I have been exploring throughout this volume, but also as perpetrated with the goal of directly humiliating the enemy, of “degrading” him to the status of “mere female.” Torture and particularly rape are commonly discussed as mechanisms for the emasculation of the male victim, until he embodies the subjugated gendered role and feels incapable of further resistance. Apart from the humiliation of the act itself, the worst thing for Kostis about his suffering in prison is that he feels that his body “cooperated” with the torturers and that in surviving the ordeal it betrayed him. Dubravka Žarkov notes that the systematic rape of men in Bosnian concentration camps was mostly a secret affair, due to the fact that the sexual act between two men homosexualizes both parties, not merely the victim of the act: “while castration and rape as acts of violence are not per se an expression of homosexuality but of the struggle for power, they nevertheless feminize and homosexualize the man who is subjected to the violence. In the Balkan context, however, there is a difference between these two acts of violence. While castration is the symbolic appropriation of the male [o]ther’s phallic power, rape is not. In Balkan norms of sexuality, both men involved in the sexual act are homosexualized.”34 Thus the drastic difference in the acts of sexual violence performed by the camp guards and the prisoners themselves, as well as in their media representations. It seems that prison guards have mutilated and assaulted male prisoners with foreign objects in public but have not raped them in public: “Evidence . . . seems to indicate that when the prison guards engaged in raping male prisoners, they did not want witnesses. This may mean that men raped by prison guards may have had much less chance to survive. For only the death of the raped—as an erasure of the evidence—could spare the heterosexual masculinity of the rapist. Contrary to this, when prisoners were forced to assault each other, this was done in public.”35 In contrast, all the indicators and the few survivor accounts made public suggest that rape in Greek junta prisons was staged as a spectacle performed as part of some kind of obscene group ritual. Through torture and other means of brutalizing the body, the violator (entity or individual) creates the Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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fiction of authority, which is contestable and discredited by both the perpetrator and the subject of torture. This is the same kind of fictional authority against which the “performing” body protests in acts of self-mutilation. It is, in fact, a method of bringing into existence something (a concept of authority) that is in effect fictional yet that tends to establish itself as immutable and indisputable. Through the intimate, almost erotic relationship between the torturer and the victim, the act of torture converts “absolute pain into fiction of absolute power”; it conjures up the dominance over the life of the tortured, the power that is in reality imaginary and that both the perpetrator and the victim recognize as false. At the same time torture obliterates both the language and the body; it is a “mock execution” of the material body of the tortured.36 Torture could thus be interpreted as the Lacanian Real that is unrepresentable in the symbolic order “except by its effects.”37 It is precisely through this metaphor of the fiction of power that holds a claim to historical inevitability that Polymeris Voglis depicts systematic right-wing state terror during the Greek civil war of 1946–49. According to Voglis, the “reinvention of the history of punishment” was caused by the reinstatement of the state authority that was disputed due to the chaos in which Greece found itself during World War II. Namely, at the time the country was the scene of resistance against foreign occupying armies (Italians and Germans), as well as the civil war between domestic fractions that defended their pro- and anticommunist options, both further complicated by foreign interventions.38 Regardless of whether people recruited for the resistance against the leftist “threat” were invested with any state authority or not, they were still actively involved in its reconstruction.39 Mika Haritos-Fatouros explains the process of the creation of sadistic torturers out of “ordinary” people through communal rituals in which they are involved in their institutionalized training. She states that more often than not, torturers have little or nothing in their background that would indicate the profile of a sadist. Most often they did not suffer childhood trauma and exhibited little or no deviant sexual behavior, and they usually had no previous record of violence. Instead, she concludes, the trail leads to the systematic training to which they are subjected in order to be used for specific purposes; torturers are made, not born. Haritos-Fatouros compares the process of the “creation” of torturers in Greece, as well as in US military training, with induction in university fraternities and initiation rites in preindustrial societies, concluding that torturer initiation for the most part follows the steps of initiation into a traditional community/cult. Yet there are some major discrepancies between the two models:



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The trainees [in the military] were not “reborn” and were not prepared to enter the society of their elders, nor to embark on a special vocation which would last the rest of their lives. They were being prepared to live the brief life of the oppressor and/or the torturer as long as their service lasted. Most important, the neophytes in pre-industrial societies are psychologically prepared from childhood for the initiation that will turn them into worthy members of their community. This is also the belief held by the members of college fraternities and of most cults. . . . The raw candidates for the Military Police, on the other hand, had been only vaguely prepared for rough treatment, with the indistinct goal of becoming “tough men,” of becoming Military Policemen, a job for which most of them had not volunteered in the first place.40

No wonder that many of the former Greek junta torturers pleaded for clemency in the trials, claiming that they were likewise victims of a brutal system. Such a case of the speedy processing of new recruits into weapons of state terror is still under the spotlight in the former Yugoslav community, as more evidence of the involvement of public personalities with torture and rape camps during the 1990s becomes available. The bottom line is, however, that the ritual informs human activities to the extent that even criminal enterprises of this magnitude read like perverse thanatopolitical communions, with human individuals at stake on both sides. One of the details most victims of the Greek junta remember is a very popular song of the time about escaping the troubles of historical existence by leaving for the jungle, which the torturers regularly utilized to boost their mock-tribal spirit during sessions of collective beatings of prisoners. “I shall go to the jungle with Tarzan and have a good time . . . and if the wild animals devour me, history will write about me that the animals ate me up and not the hurricane of our century.”41 It is a seemingly unimportant detail, but it conveys the irresistible irony of the totalitarian system that creates and sustains its own pseudohistorical narrative through the ritual destruction of bodies. In truth, there does not seem to exist a viable option for “escape” from the “violence of history,” which is frequently little more than the terror of the state, as Haritos-Fatouros writes, mythologized to the effect of appearing irrepressible, irrevocable, and incomprehensible, a veritable real of human existence. Besides her overt interest in the facts of the sexual violation of her father’s body in prison, Marina’s angst also targets her father’s leftist leanings or, rather, his proleftist sympathies, as he was never an outspoken opponent of Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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the regime. Despite the fact of his incarceration under the military dictatorship, his political leanings never went much further than listening to the banned music of the composer Mikis Theodorakis or reading the works of poets exiled under the junta. Kostis has been silenced both by the unspeakable torture against his body and by the institutionally imposed taboo on the narratives of torture that could taint the image of not only a political regime but an entire nation. Kostis’s silence is thus the reaction of an individual who has been effectively desubjectivized, stripped of both his ethnic and his masculine identity, and whose rehabilitation, even if possible, has never been initiated. Kostis inhabits the space of a living dead subject, the one who exists on the margins of the social and perceives himself as an outsider and at a distance from others. He does not participate in the life of his family and considers himself even less part of a political, national, or church community. Small wonder then that he escapes into the world of music and literature in foreign languages, which he translates into Greek for a living. Incapable of producing his own narrative and deeply suspicious of the existence of the audience capable of being affected by his story (the big Other), whose attention alone would make such a narrative meaningful, Kostis uses language to merely rephrase words written by others. Translation is thus his safe hiding place, in which he faces no responsibility for the words he uses. His evident lack of commitment, in comparison to which Marina considers Abramović’s performances to be a daring confrontation with the regime, could be one of the reasons why she constantly, and rather misguidedly, juxtaposes him with her. Her interrogation revives the trauma of both Kostis’s and his father’s past, which is his true “nightmare.” That’s right, dad, you were born the same year as Marina. But her grandfather wasn’t an ordinary factory hand in an olive oil factory, but the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. And listen to this: in 1938 he was poisoned at a dinner by King Peter I’s doctor. Her grandfather was canonized, embalmed and placed in an important church in Belgrade. Her father, on the other hand, was a guerilla fighter like my grandfather. Like my grandfather—your father, dad—Marina’s father was a communist, an atheist and a WWII hero. I’m trying to find out all I can, dad. Really. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you tell me that grandpa was in Albania in ’41? When did they get wise to the fact that there was an atheist communist in the army’s ranks? When grandpa took to the mountains did they realize? Poor dad, you were born in ’46 and the first time you remember seeing your father was in ’54, when they released him from Makronisos. True or false? You were eight years old and you started crying because his face



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looked like it had been fried. That’s what you told me. True or false? And that was because of the sack full of cats. True or false? Grandpa loved cats. True or false? He felt guilty about the cats he had drowned in that sack, even though he too was drowning in the salt water. True or false? And then grandpa was retried in ’56. True or false? When did he get out of prison again? ’62? Or ’63? What’s true, dad, and what’s false? And in ’66 he drops dead from a heart attack. He bends over to pour some milk for a stray kitten and that’s it. Well, there’s always a silver lining: you never really had a father, but at least the guy was spared the Junta. You took that one on, dad. Actually, it took you on.42

In this breathlessly disconnected paragraph Marina reels off some of the key episodes directly preceding and following the breakout of World War II in the Balkans, as remembered in Abramović’s and her own family mythologies. The boundary is blurred between willing engagement with history and subjection to state terror. Torture methods Marina touches on were employed against individuals suspected of leftist engagement or leanings during the civil war, usually referred to as the “white terror,” and the dictatorship, the two most recent episodes of political persecution in Greece.43 Authors writing about prison camps tend to perceive them as one of the greatest evils of the past century and one of its most original inventions, capable of various transformations and renewed uses in political circumstances well beyond the end of World War II. Once the horrors of the Holocaust were finally made known, few could believe that the camp was alive and kicking in its next incarnation in the new utopian communist society to which so many Marxist intellectuals of the West looked with hope. In the wake of World War II the camp was seen as a place of “rehabilitation” for a broad range of very loosely defined “political opponents,” and, as in any witch-hunt frenzy, the situation offered plenty of opportunity for massive denouncements, random arrests, and the not infrequent settling of private accounts. In many instances it was an economic enterprise with unpaid labor, while the torture and brainwashing methods applied to the inmates offered an opportunity for the eradication of dissent and the creation of a true utopian heaven where everybody would think and feel the same—or almost.44 Added to this is the fact that until recently comparatively little was known of post–World War II concentration camps, due to the aura of shame with which the survivors were faced upon their return to society and attempts at reintegration.45 The Greek historical consciousness records the island of Makronisos, the Isle of Shame, as they also call it, as the site of torture, execution, and “rehabilitation” for thousands of former resistance fighters and communists in the Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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period during and also well after the civil war of 1946–49. This island came into existence with the generous support of conservative right-wingers, former Nazi supporters, as well as with the backing of the British and American governments. Most of the horror stories we know from the Siberian gulag were replicated in Makronisos, but there was one particularity of this “rehabilitation center” that the communist camps lacked—the nationalist dimension of the enterprise. Namely, the island was a site where suspected leftist sympathizers and communists were not only brainwashed, tortured, and murdered but underwent special educational treatment that was supposed to teach them what exactly they were jeopardizing when affiliating themselves with communist ideology: Greekness itself. Thus the inmates’ homework in between tortures and starvation was building small replicas in local stone of the Athenian Parthenon and other temples of the Acropolis or staging the plays of Euripides. Perhaps the ultimate humiliation awaited those who were set on a path toward conversion, who were made to sign a declaration denouncing their former affiliations and were subsequently sent off to fight their former comrades in the civil war.46 The ruins of the small temples are still visible on the island, while there are no memorials or museums, not even plaques dedicated to the memory of the thousands who died there.47 It was fairly successfully suppressed from the collective national memory as an embarrassment for democracy. Yugoslavia likewise had its own history of communist concentration camps that housed thousands of prisoners accused of “pro-Stalinist” inclinations after the Cominform expulsion of Yugoslavia for its Titoist policies in 1948. These camps were located on a few deserted islands in the Croatian archipelago, although the one place that remains emblazoned in collective memory is Goli Otok, literally the “barren” or “naked” island.48 The place was a strictly kept state secret, and former inmates could not testify about their imprisonment for decades.49 Not envisioned as places of mass extermination, post–World War II concentration camps did not represent a site of universal horror like the Nazi lagers. Nevertheless, as the ex-Yugoslav author Dubravka Ugrešić says, they were “not conceived as a place of extermination but as a terrible and shameful school of mutual humiliation.”50 They were “correctional” institutions with ingenious methods of ideological “reeducation,” psychological destruction, and torture, but also regular sessions of brutal torture by “reformed” fellow prisoners.

The Tortured Body as a Catalyst for Collective Frustration When Renata Salecl discusses the performative body, she talks about the act of self-mutilation as a reaction deploring the loss of authority and structure for the performing subject. However, there is an important perspective

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of performance art and body mutilation that this definition overlooks, and that is their sacrificial aspect, in which the performing body serves as a catalyst for accumulated aggression and frustration and a vent for their release that allows for some kind of collective relief from mandatory restraint. Inasmuch as the artist places her body at the crowd’s disposal as a medium for the audience’s acting out of their darkest instincts and secret fantasies, the performative body is transformed into a sacrificial offering. Any such performance necessarily contains an element of the carnivalesque, since the sacrificed body is publicly offered for the attenuation of social tensions and prevention of violence on a massive scale, although this mock ritual does not imply the disturbance of the universal hierarchy, as Bakhtin famously theorizes.51 In fact, this role of the performative body is more in tune with the process of the reestablishment or the sustenance of social order and as such is paradoxically complicit with what it claims to subvert in the first place. Some of Marina Abramović’s key performances, in which she lends her passive body to the audience and lets them do with it whatever they choose, fall into this category. Her most famous act of this kind is certainly Rhythm 0, for which she placed seventy-two objects at the audience’s disposal and gave them free rein to use the objects as they pleased.52 She took upon herself the part of an object that was denuded, abused, humiliated, and even physically hurt (lacerated), but only for as long as she stood completely passive, avoiding eye contact with the audience, most of whom, apparently oblivious to her crying and bleeding, kept the abusive ritual running. However, on the dot of the six hours assigned for the performance, when Abramović “woke up” and walked into the crowd gathered around her, the people literally fled the room. Her act implies that fictitious power created through systematic torture relies and can only be performed on the body that is nonresponsive and seemingly submissive. It also suggests that verbal or emotional communication with the torturer that does not exhibit fear and subjection to the sheer terror of physical pain would shatter the very foundation on which the relationship of the torturer and his victim is based. Kostis probably has this in mind when he deplores his body’s “collusion” with his torturers, and it also resonates with Foucault’s claims about the body’s participation in its own subjection.53 The problem still remains of the scale and intensity of torture, violence, or annihilation of bodies that has been and continues to be staged historically and that acts as a powerful deterrent for resistance to repression. One of the metaphors that the sacrifice inevitably invokes is that of the suffering and victimized body of Christ and his martyrdom in the face of the ultimate, irrevocable, and noninterfering authority of his Father. Christ’s sacrifice both creates and redeems the community circumscribed by this Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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Figure 5.5. Rhythm 0. Courtesy of Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

event. This is a community whose origin and telos lie in death, as it not only emerges out of death but exists for the purpose of easing the burden of death on its individual members. But this community is increasingly oblivious of the substance of the sacrificial event that delineates its creation and existence.54 Instead, the community is mesmerized by the sheer spectacle of death and the obscenity of the tortured and expiring body, to the extent that death becomes the community’s focus and its destiny. Kostis deplores the civilization created and sustained on this fascinating spectacle after attending an Easter church ceremony: “This is what they worship: torture, a death sentence, a naked, dirty, wounded, pierced, bloody, torn-apart, suffering body dying a slow death. A tortured body. That’s what their worship and love is directed toward. That’s what turns them on.”55 However, as much as Kostis’s perception is critical of the falsity of church communion that lost its true meaning amid the superficial manifestations of the institutional ceremony, it emphatically underlines his own failure to comprehend its meaning. Neither his own apparent identification with Christ’s agony nor his alleged leftist politics prevents him from displaying palpable intolerance and racist hatred toward immigrants. He is unwilling to grant victims of hardship the respect that as a survivor he demands of others. Quite the contrary, the humiliation he fantasizes inflicting on the bodies of immigrant vendors and



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Figure 5.6. Rhythm 0. Courtesy of Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

prostitutes he meets on the streets of Athens is identical to the humiliation he himself experienced in jail. The end of the novel brings a kind of reconciliation between the father and daughter, when Kostis realizes that they are both doomed to following the same path of suffering that his father walked before them. In a way they both expiate the same transcendental hereditary guilt through their suffering. Despite the retroactive knowledge of the mistakes he made and the futility of his political beliefs, Kostis is confident that, given a new chance at a different life, he would unmistakably retrace the same steps again: My father was a nightmare, [Kostis] wants to say that, too, to spit it out from deep inside himself. And there’s more: I listened to him tell me . . . about the battles and exile and the prisons, and it was as if I were translating a book written in a foreign language. And, afterwards, when I would go over what I had translated, I saw that it read: You must suffer even more. You haven’t suffered enough, not as much as he did. He wants more. Even more. And I joined the struggle. And I would again. I would do it all over again, if I could.56

Kostis ends up clearly resigned to his life, as he chooses not to discuss his past but instead to embrace every bit of it, even the horrors he was subjected to,

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as well as the fact that he has become for his own daughter the same kind of a “nightmare” that his father was for him. The end of the novel finds Kostis looking at his ruined body in the mirror in ironic reconciliation with himself, his father, and the tragic legacy that he inherited and further transmitted to his daughter: “the discolored bruises, faded scars, the furrowed forehead, the bulging veins on the thighs and calves, the tight bandages around his swollen feet. Gloria Patri.”57

Silencing History and Silence about History Silence about the past originates in various degrees of involvement or (dis)interestedness in events: there is the silence of the perpetrator, which is symptomatic of the denial of criminal involvement; the silence of the nonacting bystander, always finding multiple excuses for his dispassionate voyeurism; or the silent protest of the victim muted by the sheer horror of the lived experience. A survivor’s silence attempts a dethroning of history while simultaneously operating as a death-defying stratagem. As victims of history both the mother and Kostis realize that any meaningful translation of their losses into words is impossible. To a certain extent their determination to ignore history by not talking about it can be viewed as their intention to create an alternative space free of history, even though if ever concievable such an unhistorical existence confines them to a presence that also lies outside the conventional societal order. Wary of the double function of language— powerful enough to create and destroy things yet insufficient for conveying the horror of the lived experience—the mother’s first instinct is to refuse to speak about her losses.58 Moreover, her silence is equally an act of defiance against the immanent violence of history that shaped not only her life but her body as well. Her refusal to utter her trauma implies the impotent protest of a victim who, failing to articulate history, naively hopes that she can defer its force. She seems to be aware of the power of silence, although in her interpretation the underlying motivation for refusing to speak is not protest but defense, fending off the fear of what comes after silence is broken. “It is not silence that frightens us but what follows it: the unavoidability of choice, the impossibility of change, the irreversibility of time, the order of things in the universe,” she says in the first sentences communicated to her son, after she finally agrees to talk.59 Kostis, on the other hand, fiercely defends his right not to confess to his daughter and thus demonstrates disbelief in the existence of the big Other and its authority, not capable of heeding his intimate confession and even less of acting upon it to prevent a recurrence of his life. The mother’s words will take on a much heavier meaning in the closing lines of the novel, when her son is faced with the alternative of remaining

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silent or articulating his inner conflict, the strategy that is linked to the exile’s choice between self-assertion and virtual invisibility. The silence into which the narrator of Bait withdraws has roots in the precariousness of his exilic existence, his language, and the new identity he wants to forge for himself. On the one side, his silence is caused by the conflict between his New World existence, which is aggressively oriented toward the future, and imposes an imperative oblivion regarding the past and his old identity. On the other side lies his refusal to relapse into his mother tongue, which is, on the contrary, too immersed in history and the past he wants to erase from memory. His anxiety about writing a story is further complicated by the idea that writing is simply a process of mediation by which the writer effaces himself in his own text.60 In his narrative he produces an unsuccessful transposition of his mother’s life story into the new linguistic and cultural idiom. His desire for inclusion in the adopted culture makes him create a “lie,” a clichéd narrative that panders to what he believes are the expectations of the Western reader. The story that was supposed to be his ticket to the new life fails and instead becomes metaphoric of his condition, of his liminal position, as well as of everything that for him seems unattainable—a new identity and an ahistorical existence. This unfaithful transcription of his mother’s life is a definitive break with his own silence, yet it does not bring about the resolution of his dilemma. On the contrary, it seems that the very attempt at verbalizing historical trauma, moreover in a foreign language, becomes instrumental in further suspending his desired assimilation into the new culture. By decisively rejecting his mother tongue, the narrator never really makes peace with the past and never fully works through his family’s historical trauma. It remains repressed and threatens to make his life a repetition of his mother’s. Neither Marina nor the nameless narrator of Bait succeeds in conveying their parents’ experience in their artistic medium because their accounts are of necessity vicarious. But even victims themselves seem incapable of giving an account of events that could represent for the audience the truth of the lived horror. Shoshana Felman refutes the very possibility of talking about trauma, even by the survivors of traumatic events. She states that testimonies as such are a posteriori recollections of events that do “not provide narrative knowledge” and instead only represent a belated account of the “failed witness.”61 To illustrate this she quotes from Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1989). Written more than forty years after the Holocaust, the essay reflects on the dissipation of remembrance with time and on the selective way that memory, both of victims and of perpetrators, rearranges events. Levi affirms that survivors, those who lived through an experience, cannot be true witnesses of events. Only the “submerged” ones, if they were able Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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to, could give a full and uncorrupted account of history: “we the survivors, are not the true witnesses. . . . Those who . . . have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute . . . they are . . . the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.” The horror lived in situations of ultimate dehumanization of the subject and unspeakable suffering leads to the “historical disintegration of the witness.” 62 Another pattern of silence that effectively prevents the working through of past trauma is the silence that is institutionally imposed in order to occlude collective collusion with a repressive historical project. Neni Panourgia calls this process of deliberate silencing of the uneasy past “enforced amnesia,” and she writes about it in relation to the destruction of police files and historical archives about the Greek left by the first post-dictatorship leftist government. This unprecedented destruction of evidence was allegedly performed in the name of national reconciliation and avoidance of reprisals and further political confrontations, for the division-free future of Greece.63 Yet the enforced silence about the past emerges as a most dangerous practice, and I do not mean only the kind of the “conspiracy of silence” that the author W. G. Sebald made it his project to expose in the aftermath of Nazism.64 Something else is the matter here, although its model distinctly resembles that of a conspiracy, which undermined the prospects for an open political dialogue in Greece. Rather than working it out and teaching the opposing sides to learn to accept some kind of a cohabitating multiplicity of truths, this act establishes the kind of silence that with one sweeping gesture attempts to annihilate the fact of very real and deadly social tension, pretending that it never existed. Yugoslavia has already fallen victim to such programmed annihilation of the past, first by the post–World War II communist governments and then again in the period of nationalist revivalism in the 1980s and 1990s. While there is a risk of great oversimplification of a very complex matter, we could state that one of the latent factors in the second Yugoslavia’s dissolution, which in many aspects replayed the collapse of the kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941, was that the history of anti-Nazi resistance in the kingdom of Yugoslavia was never discussed, taught, or written about from more than a single perspective.65 The first post–World War II communist government and the subsequent socialist ones monopolized the national narrative both by obliterating any memory of resistance that did not refer to Tito’s guerillas and by covering up very real ethnic and religious tensions underlying what was in effect a parallel war to the one fought against the Nazis. The postwar communist regime imposed a peace and cohabitation that did not give the necessary recognition to the ethnic and religious causes of World War II violence

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against civilians, in comparison with which Nazi crimes paled. Once the various homemade profascist factions were dealt with as “collaborators” and “enemies of the state,” the victorious regime promoted and mythologized its role in the creation of Yugoslavia. No distinction was ever attempted between those who collaborated and those who were executed in the aftermath of the war as collateral damage in the general confusion under martial law and retaliation against “traitors.” Nor was an attempt ever made to investigate the individual responsibility of those executed and rehabilitate those whose rehabilitation was needed. Half a century later the Nazis were conveniently forgotten and old domestic hatreds resurrected so that the general throat cutting could resume where it had previously been interrupted. Nobody even mentioned the fascists anymore, and for two decades post-Yugoslav revisionist history treated World War II like little more than a civil war in which this or that ethnicity was a collective victim of another group’s hegemonic tendencies.66 Boris Buden goes even further in saying that the proliferation of anti-totalitarian discourses since the 1980s, claiming that the Yugoslav narrative was a period in which the prodemocratic masses were captive to the “communists,” of a different ethnic or religious background, was in fact readying the ground for a new totalitarianism. Such suppression of the truth of totalitarianism and negation of people’s willing participation in the project has, according to Buden, only one goal, and that is the ultimate reproduction of totalitarianism.67 This new totalitarianism consists to an almost equal degree of the oppressive and violent reimposition of traditionalism and religious and family values, a veritable terror of the defeated spirit of patriarchal chauvinism, and the repressive economic structure introduced in the entire post-Yugoslav space, whose consequences for the general population are as devastating in terms of unemployment and disempowerment as was the war itself. The kind of selective representation of the past that I discuss in relation to Yugoslav and Greek post–World War II history basically operates on the premise of quieting the ghosts lest they should fly into a rage. The irony is that such quasi-benevolent interventionism could easily trigger a reverse mechanism allowing the repressed past to return with even more intensity. Thus the aggressive assertion of once-suppressed national identities from within what used to be Yugoslavia virtually reenacted the dissolution of the first Yugoslav state and the old interethnic war. As the mother in Bait always feared, the replay of the past hibernating under the blanket of relatively peaceful cohabitation transpires exactly half a century later, deadlier than ever. Unable to face it once again, she succumbs to death. The almost verbatim iteration of her life by other refugees, the replay of history she never stopped anticipating Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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but refused to believe could take place, finally overwhelms her. She blames the metamorphosis of the past narrative through revisionist demagoguery for the destruction of the present and of the chance for a meaningful future: “you can’t be happy when the past is all you have and when you don’t give up your memories. . . . Whoever lives with history is not living with life, he’s a corpse even when he’s alive.”68 Her son offers a more structured analysis of the problem of societies arrested in the discourse of the past: Suddenly everyone knew what the real meaning of the past had been, but no one noticed that the future was no longer being talked about, nor even the present, that it was not a question of a psychoanalytical reliving of some event in order to establish its true sense, but that the past, life in the past, was being offered in exchange for life in the present, that a life already lived through was being designated the only genuine life; that is, life was being asked to be a constant marking of time, a continual reenactment of the past, which becomes merely an end in itself.69

In his constant weighing of the stereotyped ahistoricism of the New World and the inability of the Yugoslav people to move forward precisely for the fact of being so profoundly steeped (and stuck) in history, Albahari’s narrator merely voices the dictum of the day that Balkan communities are unable to envision their own future but instead compulsively replay the same old tragic scenario. Many a confused reporter from the recent Yugoslav wars concluded not only that the warring parties waged battles from World War II but that many were in fact so blinded by hatred that they believed they were still battling the Ottomans or Habsburgs. However, declares Miljenko Jergović, there is little left to a society divided by the silenced past other than to eternally relive it and constantly reinvent revised versions of its heroic history. Making the giant leap into the future without first resolving past issues certainly is not an acceptable alternative for Jergović. In fact, it only worsens the problem, because the only way to achieve it is to proclaim a taboo on the subject, to enforce general silence that repeatedly leads back to square one: “The phrase that we should turn to the future is dangerously stupid . . . and was uttered by all those who endeavored to emerge victorious over Milošević or Tuđman, or both. Only in the past can you resolve something that took place in the past.”70 The mother’s disturbing immersion in history need not have been put into words or text in order to be understood. Her whole body exuded history, it was shaped by history, it lived history, it was history. “The fact that my mother had walked a little bent over, as if she were constantly climbing a steep slope, as if she were resisting something that was pulling her

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downward, [would have been] attributed to rheumatism and not to historical reality,” says her son in calm irony.71 The mother infers that the cause of her silence about the past lies in her attempt not to let it completely determine her life. Ironically, it is the faithful replay of the strife that she once survived with new participants that signals her immediate death. Kostis in Interrogation shares these fears about reliving trauma, as well as the conviction that one’s traumatic past needs to be embraced as integral part of one’s existence but then stored in a compartment from which it cannot disturb daily life. It must not be repressed, but it should not control one’s reality either. Such a compromise with the past is what Walter Benjamin suggests in his “Angel of History,” arguably his best-known allegorical image of history: that the acknowledgment of the past is equally necessary for the sake of its memorialization as well as for a reconciliation with it. A reconciliation that could, perhaps, lead to the point at which the human race will be able to extricate itself from the repeated historical tragedy that our short-sightedness transforms into a narrative of continuous progress. Benjamin suggests that liberation from the repetitive cycle of repression and suffering is possible, but to each generation the challenge seems to be too great, and they unfailingly retrace the steps of those before them.72 What is most troubling is that neither the effort to enforce the vision of a bright future without a productive dialogue about the past nor the autistic reliving of an imaginary self-centered past at any point reflects the important fact of historical responsibility. In contrast, Bait’s mother assumes full accountability for the chunk of history that belongs to her. Everything that happened to her personally was a consequence of her decisions and actions. Her son echoes this in his opinion that each individual is answerable for his or her participation in events, however negligible and indirect it may seem in a broader temporal projection. He feels that his personal burden consisted in carrying a broken rifle for a whole year when conscripted for army duty and not reporting it to his superiors. That apparently insignificant episode, in his belief, was surely indicative of large-scale collapse of the society, which was badly malfunctioning underneath seemingly efficient appearances. Ultimately, that broken rifle could have saved or sealed somebody’s life in the last war. Kostis in Interrogation likewise stakes his claim to his own chunk of historical accountability and urges Marina to do the same. By realizing that his life would look no different if he were given a chance to relieve it, Kostis makes peace with the memory and responsibility that his father shared in his own and his son’s predicament. Both texts seem to suggest that there exists no exit from the punitive cycle of history, so it is no wonder that the independent strategies of the Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

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protagonists fail to bring about the quick relief that they intended to achieve. Due to her obsession with the spectacle of the wounded body, Marina’s final exhibition falls short of conveying the horror of her father’s suffering. She is unable to show the idealism and the inevitable defeat that inform Kostis’s resignation to history and his participation in it, as well as to his ruined body as the site of that conflict. She remains equally incapable of freeing her body from the circle of suffering and the self-torture in which she is confined. In the final analysis the new generation’s quest for liberation from historical determinism turns out to be a failure. The artist and the child in them neither knows how nor sincerely wants to cut ties with the familial, social, and historical that they recognize as the obstacle to their individual accomplishment. Christ’s tortured body does not rejoice in the loss of God’s control over life and the promise of a world liberated from his threatening panoptical attention; he cries out to the father who has abandoned him. For all his talk about the limitations of language and for all her body laceration, for all the blood and words they spill in the process, it is not deliverance from authority for which Marina and our narrator yearn but, paradoxically, even more of it. The bleeding body thus does not deplore its own captivity in search of some absolute freedom but, on the contrary, desires that the confinement shows structure and that the authority behind it has a clear sense of purpose. It would thus preempt the meaningless repetition of suffering, which is the ultimate expression of humans’ inability to liberate themselves. Instead, like their parents and many before them, they will both have to learn to embrace their own failures and suffering and cherish them as their most precious possessions.



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Conclusion Community , Communalism , Communism

A TV sketch by the Sarajevan New Primitives collective, which aired some time in the late 1980s, illustrates the absence of political ambition and ideals among contemporary youth when juxtaposed with the generation of their parents, the protesters of 1968: joining student protests after decades of hiding in the forest, unaware that Tito’s repercussions for 1968 had long ceased, a former protest leader arrives at an unnamed Bosnian university in the 1980s, complete with his Jimmy Hendrix gear and a guitar. Greeted by students who protest by shouting, “We want goals!” “We need ideas!” and “Meat in every meal!” the “veteran protester” poses with much pomp. In a hilarious exchange with the political leadership of the university, he is unable to comprehend the new vacuous phraseology. True to his old beliefs, he keeps shouting slogans against “technocracy” and in support of the “unlimited liberation of thought and expression.” The student leaders, however, are easily coaxed into abandoning their protest after being promised larger servings of meat in the canteen, at which the “veteran” leaves disgusted. While scathing of the 1980s generation’s absence of political consciousness, the episode is

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no less critical of a specific kind of idolatry for the “cause of 1968,” with its monopoly on the ideals of liberation. The grand inspiration behind the Belgrade protests, but also the worldwide protests of 1968, was the early Marxist motto that freedom for the individual means freedom for all. Although promising to be a push toward the genuine liberation of the human subject, the 1968 movements instead ended with a whimper. Behind the resonant slogans demanding “everything and now”—promoting a radical break with the past, with the conservative complacency of their parents’ generation, and with the entire apparatus of ideological indoctrination—existed, it turned out, a deep anxiety, almost a hope, that something would somehow interrupt this wave and resolve the stalemate that the protesters themselves did not know how to end. Tito’s speech to the Belgrade students offered exactly such a deus ex machina conclusion and an easy way out of a confusing dead end that promised no concessions on either side, even less a plan for what would happen when the revolution was over. The protesters’ relieved celebration at the announcement of Tito’s alleged endorsement of their demands was soon to be followed by a veritable storm of regime repression that forever revoked the hard-won improvements in civil liberties from previous decades. Even more strikingly, however, this new repressive wave permanently undermined “third way” aspirations between Cold World polarities that Yugoslavia represented at the time, regardless of the country’s political shortcomings and economic ineffectiveness. Instead of expanding its potential as a model of different policy in a dichotomous world, the entire country was sacrificed to solidification and the “purification” of each of its constitutional national bodies from an increasingly longer list of undesired elements, the result of which is the current heir states’ mimicking of and dependency on the West, which is little less than colonial in nature. We would not be mistaken to say that Yugoslavs did not have the courage necessary to see their own emancipatory project evolve into a society that could have been (why not!) a model for others but instead chose petty ethnoreligious nationalism as a means of escaping the tightening grip of the totalitarian state. One ideological dogmatism thus smoothly and imperceptibly replaced its predecessor, while old political players continued to swim in the new currents after making cosmetic changes to their biographies. Despite the deserved criticism that the protests of 1968 (on the global level) have been exposed to in the decades that followed, they could be considered the last attempt at what we could tentatively define as a worldwide political change whose failure made possible the rampant hijacking of politics by conservative and right-wing elites dealing one blow after another to civil liberties ever since. Small wonder then that this very last demonstration

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of people’s inability to live up to their bold demands in the face of blunt force and their own fears should become many a conservative pundit’s favorite punching bag.1 In a world that seems afraid to dream big, ineffective actions with limited goals merely reinforce the status quo of the system that caused them in the first place. At the time I am writing this, we are witnessing a wave of popular protests, revolutions, and armed resistance to homegrown dictatorships, all mixed with foreign military interventions certain to cause more harm than good.2 Meritocratic distribution of wealth and privilege undermines the last atoms of the sense of responsibility for the less fortunate and in turn produces a world swept by the rapid deterioration of the social state, perpetuating what Zygmunt Bauman defines as “really existing community.”3 This process represents perhaps the ultimate surrender of humanity to the pressures of the economy and bare survival. Habermas describes it as apathy of the “satisfied and relatively satisfied” population toward the political process at whose end lies the final “desolidarization” of society. In case such “handing over” of vast numbers of people as excess by the conformist “relatively satisfied” strata to the increasingly repressive state does take place—increasingly evident in how the less affected or unaffected social strata do not react to the cutting of wages and of medical and social security to the poorest—this would represent a veritable mass sacrifice of the impoverished majority. In such a scenario Habermas predicts the collapse of the democratic process, with the disenfranchised majority remaining a “thorn in the flesh of political culture”: “Neoliberal theory deals with private subjects who ‘do and permit what they will’ according to their own preferences and value orientations within the limits of legally permissible action. They are not required to take any mutual interest for one another; they are thus not equipped with any moral sense of social obligation. The legally requisite respect for private liberties that all competitors are equally entitled to is something very different from the equal respect for the human worth of each individual.”4 The sense of security, the very foundation stone of the communal project, achieved at the cost of the willing submission of freedom or sometimes outright repression, is becoming an ever more precious commodity. Yet the reaction to this dire situation is appallingly inarticulate, and it is legitimate to question whether any social change of greater consequence could ever arise from it. Greece, which is of primary interest for this volume, has for the past four years been shaken by rapidly rising debt, workers’ protests, alleged anarchism, a dysfunctional economy, and corruption scandals. For all the disturbance and disruption caused by frequent protests, which end with the Conclusion

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participants returning home and watching the report on the evening news, they have caused no exit from the deadlock, even less created a comprehensive solution to accumulated problems.5 Not infrequently the impression that such protests leave is that they are primarily organized toward drawing the attention of both the poorly defined entity they are challenging and the complacent general public—and attention is indeed what they achieve, but little else. Demands limiting themselves to a small rise in pay, or similar token concessions, without addressing the causes of social inequalities, can easily be ignored by those against whom they are apparently directed, as they never transgress the boundaries of behavior legally allowed and expected. The social structure counts on such minor disturbances and by now is well equipped to absorb and dissolve them. Not even “anarchists” who stage acts of terrorist exhibitionism have any clear idea of their goals, save for serving as an outlet for venting some of the accumulated angst. Through what seems to be the age of a general lack of clues about direction, social repression and economic inequalities not only pass unchallenged but are on the significant increase. Right-wing communalism, meanwhile, opportunistically fits into the rupture caused by disillusionment with the neoliberal capitalist option and the inability to find a better alternative. One possible conclusion of my discussion that I did not intend is that genuine liberation, since it is necessarily always undermined by very human fears and insecurities, is in fact an illusion that makes for a good intellectual exercise but is otherwise unfeasible and as such an invalid proposal—a proposal, moreover, that is negated daily in the current climate of rapidly growing existential insecurity as fertile soil for neofascist sentiments, racism, homo- and xenophobia, and the global rise of right-wing politics that, simultaneous with social conservatism, blatantly endorses lethal practices of aggressive profit grabbing with utter disregard for poverty and even less regard for the devastation of natural resources. All these developments are rather transparent, because by now it has dawned on most what is going on behind the meaningless verbiage dished out as politics to the everyday consumer—the consumer who, however, prefers to tolerate these obviously negative social phenomena, cautious of any change that could further deteriorate her personal comfort. The modern subject, at least in so-called liberal societies, is thus less a victim devoid of agency and more a conformist accomplice in the increasingly repressive political landscape.6 Opposition to this global current is inarticulate, and the exit is generally sought in solutions that do not transgress the limits of the law, which is itself a hostage to politics reflecting the very boundaries of freedom, which have grown too tight. It is a perpetual vicious circle that prevents any effective social transformation,

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even when it seems within reach.7 Cataloging the too abundant evidence of fearful attempts at social change that regularly ended in the same blind alley, albeit with slightly different players, is a fruitless exercise. To paraphrase Ivo Andrić, the meaning of history and human behavior in history is to be sought not in the names, numbers, dates, or locations of historical events, but in the general immutable principles underlying them. The change does not arrive with the mere replacement of national leaders or political parties with their successors, but with radical change in people’s attitudes, beliefs, and pursuits, and these are always the hardest to accomplish, and no previous revolutions, purportedly performing precisely such radical reinventions of human society, have come close. We can thus be almost sure that no such attempts at a foundational transformation, even if theoretically possible or put into practice, will be able to shape a new social paradigm any time soon.

Community Begins with Desire, but So Does Unfreedom The central theme of this volume is the sacrifice of bodies, material and metaphorical, to the ideology of community construction, whether the national community or any other type of “communal” organization founded on the conformity of its members. Sacrifice is generally considered within the boundaries of the elimination of potentially subversive difference, and the victim is usually not a participating member of the community, yet she or he cannot represent radical difference that obscures recognition either. However, the texts chosen for this volume also point to the fact that every community member is likewise a sacrificial offering for the collective: each individual is required to sacrifice in her- or himself the part that is other and inassimilable because only then will she or he be able to partake of privileged insider status. Sacrificed bodies are symbolic of the construction of communal spirit and order but also of the delimitation of borders. Each individual can likewise be sacrificed as excessive to the balanced and smooth functioning of the system. The victimhood arising from such a community model that I take as my topic is the “pathogen,” the alien body whose difference is productively created within the community in compensation for the rivalry and disloyalty intrinsic to every communal project and arising from conflicting desires. The desire underlying the construction project is therefore always illicit, regardless of whether it is directed at what belongs to another or at an other that irresistibly attracts the desirer as much as it repulses him. But the object of desire also represents the ultimate source of fear and has to be destroyed both as compromising evidence and for the illusion of power that the desirer hopes to establish over his own dangerously exposed weakness. Conclusion

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Conflict thus emerges as an intrinsic characteristic of the building enterprise that denudes the disloyalty at the roots of the (male) pact as much as it further fractures the nascent community, pitting brother against brother and each man against others. A community riven by rivalry offers a poor model of the homogeneity with which each such enterprise commences, yet this weakness must not be revealed. The conflict is successfully transposed onto a discursively constructed difference allegedly thriving in the community’s midst, while the subject finds himself under constant pressure to demonstrate his loyalty to the hegemonic and unitary narrative. Potentially liberating difference, inherent in individuals and communities alike, and the main source both of the very desire that motivates the building effort and also of the conflict that tears it apart, is dealt with as a threat until the community is safely brought into goose-step line by general calls for conformity. Heterogeneity is manipulated and constructed into a visible difference that opposes the hegemonic narrative and threatens to bring down the entire communal project. In the decisive dealing with this principle that carries the potential to usurp the dull but comfortable stability of imaginary collective identity, the difference is produced, destroyed, and buried into the deepest recesses of collective memory. Yet the edifice is unsafe from the beginning, as this reminder of a deeply seated conflict overcome only by the common crime eventually erupts into chaos, bringing down the precarious structure. I interpret the key motifs, the body and the sacrificial act, in order to ascertain their significance in the construction of the nation, but also every other communal structure whose appropriation of the metaphor of a homogenized and unified collectivity disallows departure from a prescribed norm. My analysis of sacrificial logic presents a broad spectrum of notions of sacrifice. Much bears little resemblance to the immurement of a live female body that in the legend carries a certain symbolic meaning in the process of community building, despite woman’s liminal position in relation to both her family that gives her away and the community her body helps construct. Girard’s writing on the nature of the sacred, which designates every sacrifice necessarily a surrogate for the actual victim, would entail that in the Balkan medieval legend the immured woman saves a more important (male?) victim who should have died in the edifice in her stead. Feminism’s privileging of the female subject, on the other hand, suggests that any male victim necessarily conceals the original sacrifice, who is always a woman/ mother and thus a true communal offering. From the claim that woman is the most common sacrifice, proposed by some texts examined here, it could be deduced that the female body, or the principle of unrestrained sexuality, is the liberating principle that humanity so desires yet is afraid to embrace.

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As its embodiment, woman must pay the ultimate price. Some feminist writing applicable to my topic indicates the seductive conclusion that woman’s is the position of undisputed victimhood. Others, like Drakulić, for example, unsentimentally deprivilege the topos of women as powerless victims of the patriarchal pact, requiring that they accept their share of responsibility for political developments. I have already voiced my own disagreement with privileging of woman’s victimhood and have argued from the beginning that woman is not the only sacrifice, even if the immurement of the female body is the common trope from which this analysis of the sacrificial economy commences. This volume therefore does not singularly position the sacrificial symbolic around the female body or any other monolithic subjectivity. Quite the contrary, it introduces other victims, some of whom are murdered in exactly the same ritualistic or mock ritualistic manner as the woman in the legend of immurement that opens this inquiry. Not only is the feminine not reducible to the liberatory principle, but it can also be the seat of the darkest desires and a sacrificer rather than a passive victim. For example, in Dušan Makavejev’s controversial Sweet Movie (1974), Anna Planeta, the woman-as-revolution, aimlessly cruises on her ghastly ship decorated with the oversized head of Karl Marx, picking up young, ardent, and daring men and, after making love to them and giving them a taste of “revolutionary” bliss, murders them with their full awareness and agreement. The seductress who liquidates any roaming enthusiastic youth she gets involved with is the image of a revolution that proverbially “eats its children.” The idea itself continues on the basis Makavejev’s previous work, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which posits sexual restraint and false ethics, or the “fascist in all of us,” to paraphrase Foucault, as the source of perverse human enjoyment in self-enslavement in totalitarian communism or militant capitalism.8 In that respect, the murder to which the woman-asrevolution resorts after initiating young men in the climax of revolutionary “struggle” may be interpreted as a liberating act that prevents them from inevitably betraying their ideals and entering into a conformist pact with their inner fascist. The film explicitly presents hyper-inflated revolutionary ardor as leading straight to the willing albeit inevitable sacrifice of those involved in revolution but also to the “collateral” deaths of innocents— infamously presented in the scene of the seduction of underage boys that this femme fatale (in every sense of the word) stages in the hold of her death ship. Meanwhile, Anna the Revolution sails on uninhibited . . . The body is the constant of the sacrificial economy, where the female body has an overload of connotations relating to territorial boundaries, dangerous sexuality, or vulnerable and defining maternity. Communal ideology, Conclusion

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however, equally unsparingly consumes the male body and turns it into a symbol of heroic defense or resistance of those boundaries and specificities that distinguish each and every community against others. The heroic male victim’s death likewise defines a territorial claim, although the body itself is sanitized of the sacrilegious sexuality usually associated with women and other masculinities and thus rid of the threats to communal identity that arise from this type of heterogeneity. An entire spectrum of other masculinities, defined by ethnicity, religion, age, dis/ability, class, or sexual orientation, is largely excluded from this image of the heroic male martyred for the community. The failure of such bodies (willing or not) to fit into the ideal of hegemonic masculinity creates the space for their marginalization from the mainstream, especially in communities characterized by traditionally patriarchal or otherwise emphatically masculinized male roles (i.e., military regimes). Unlike his immured female predecessor, who continues to lure unsuspecting souls from her confined burial space in myths and legends, the (heroic) male sacrifice is enshrined in official history, his loss a celebratory reminder of the community/nation’s permanence and glory. Yet even despite his eternal life in history, the anonymous male victim inside, say, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, that “strange civic deity,” as Balakrishnan calls him, is no less a ghostly residue of the mythical communal imperatives than is the legendary female. He is the ultimate reminder of unresolved tensions and strange intimacies between the sacred and secular attributes of the nation’s “longing for immortality.”9 Due to the variety of sacrifices and the crosspollination of connotations that the literary material carries, I choose to interpret the bodies sacrificed for various communal enterprises and institutions from the middle ground voiced by the definition of the victim as feminine rather than female, or even unconscious in the terms proposed by Bataille, who recognizes an affinity between such a heterogeneous element and the sacred.10 Many texts that incorporate the sacrificial narrative within historical events—world wars, totalitarian developments, or other political and demographic emergencies—reveal a preoccupation with processes and methods in achieving the goal of community sustenance in the wake of grand-scale crises and transformations. Some of the pivotal historical events this volume refers to are the Greek Anatolian war of 1922, the Dictatorship of the Colonels, the end of the twentieth-century Yugoslav wars of succession, and the many complexities and controversies of EU expansion. In relation to their accelerating course and shifting demographics, the notion of sacrifice departs even further from the legend of a sacrificial victim who dies for what is still her own community—family, city, nation—into a mass of slaughtered

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but also refugee and immigrant bodies seeking inclusion into the privileged space. Although their presence is largely ignored by mainstream populations, they incessantly represent an unpleasant reminder of an entire universe of similarly excluded bodies whose very existence spells a direct threat to the confined community that prefers to imagine itself as a solid structure within a homogenous and undisturbed cultural paradigm. Nameless and paperless, these ultimate victims are utterly devoid of the aura of the sacred, while their (frequently dead) alien bodies become another of the community’s dirty secrets. Such victims’ deaths are thus never sublimated into a heroic sacrifice for a social or a political cause. Whether these sacrifices are of ethnoreligious, sexual, or racial minorities, immigrants or refugees from poverty or persecution, their sojourn in the host community can be administratively illegal in addition to being socially or culturally undesired. Their redemption does not arrive with the a posteriori appropriation of their martyrdom for a socially significant cause, while their bodies remain frozen in ethical and legal limbo, unclaimed and equally unwanted in their home and host communities. All the texts discussed here strongly emphasize the dimension of the structure’s instability caused by forcefully removed or otherwise denied heterogeneity. They insist that the overall destruction and isolation that follow on the heels of the sacrifice of heterogeneity, pivotal to a balanced existence, are antipodal to liberation promoted as the foundational ideal of any and every community project. From this perspective human history looks very much like a struggle against freedom, even when it begins with noble goals, while visionaries and dreamers themselves get sacrificed to the profound fears of liberating change. In fact, the potential for freedom is based on the imperative of the restructuring of hegemonic hierarchies and predatory social relationships inherent in the very structure—and thus requires a different kind of sacrifice with a dubious outcome that does not necessarily elicit enthusiasm from those invited to perform it. The dreams of visionary sponsors and builders of edifices in the “bridge” novels have a potential that greatly surpasses the economically and politically pragmatic goals for which the bridges are erected, which can create a much broader community of peoples, races, and creeds than the restricted and isolated one commonly imagined, yet these visions unmistakably fail each time. So does the apparently selfless enthusiasm of the young revolutionaries in Žilnik’s Early Works, who set out on a mission to open the minds of the masses to their liberation, sexual and otherwise, a project that backfires when faced with the indifference and ignorance of the very population it was supposed to enlighten. Not even the status of victim guarantees understanding for the suffering of others: after the torture he suffered in the hands of the military, Kostis demonstrates Conclusion

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disdain for immigrants in the streets of Athens and a desire to degrade them in the identical manner that humiliation was inflicted on him; Demos’s mother does not relate to Mana in the incessant cycle of rape and birth she is forced to endure, although she herself arrived in the village as a refugee and possibly suffered a similar fate at the hands of local men; none of the Bosnian exiles inhabiting Jergović’s postwar Croatian capital demonstrates empathy for the little gypsy migrant whose murder becomes a collective cover-up operation for all the mutually antagonistic actors involved. There exists a hierarchy in victimization just as in other social relations, and even those who conquer the public space by their own blood are reluctant to let others in without a fight. So is there an alternative to this and all such sacrifice? What this volume proposes as holding potential for the genuine liberation of the subject is not overly dramatic but is in fact entirely credible. Instead of a fairly unlikely revolutionary wave of radical transformation for the total liberation of the subject, this volume emphasizes many individual acts of subversion of the hegemonic narrative that, however minuscule, still succeed in expanding the limits of freedom. Such individual acts of subversion are found in the very sacrificed body and at the exact moment when its “immurement” in and for the structure becomes certain, on the invisible boundary between the body’s obvious defeat and its humble victory: in the half-buried woman cursing the edifice that is about to eat her alive; in the raped prisoner (Kostis) who realizes he could not have chosen a different life at the moment he looks at his mutilated body in the mirror; in the excommunicated refugee (Mana) who slashes her raped body in order to forge an entry into the male lineage of her family; in the exile (Bait’s nameless narrator) who achieves the potential to invent his own identity by failing to assimilate into the hegemonic Western narrative; or in the artist (Abramović) who stubbornly superimposes her personal experience onto her family’s history, oversaturated by state regime politics. The small acts of determination and revolt by small people gradually expand the public space and create potential for its further expansions.

What Kind of a (Balkan) Community? There are multiple causes for the revitalization of negative communalisms, a growing tendency both in the Balkans and globally. One is a direct link between poverty and adherence to communalist ideologies, established and reiterated elsewhere and in this volume, and the global economic and political climate looks particularly grim with respect to this issue. The chances for a successful eradication of negative communalisms seem equal to none; they also have the tendency to appear and reappear in direct proportion to the

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variable of prosperity and overall population satisfaction with the political climate. Class inequality is undeniably an important factor in the emergence of communalisms, yet it is questionable whether they would disappear even if class stratification were abolished by a magic wand. Moreover, the strain of communalism for which the Balkans have become notorious, but one that is far from having anything autochthonously “Balkan” about it, thrives virtually everywhere, as attested by growing xenophobic sentiment and bigotry toward immigrants in the most “tolerant” of societies. With vigilante groups persecuting, for example, illegal aliens and very legal immigrants, the question arises of the possibility of imagining, let alone organizing, a community not established on repression (of the self or other). Still, this does not mean that everything has sunk too deeply into corruption and dreams of the romantic heroism necessary to save the nation from humiliation and ruin. On the contrary, there are attempts at creating a different reality, and an alternative kind of community. We could recognize some solution in the small but determined steps made by grassroots communities of citizens united around very concrete and practical goals of defending their rights against the encroachment of state or business interests. They resemble the small, determined individual acts of resistance taken by many a victim discussed in this volume. One should also not ignore the still-only-nascent process of the reinvention of the idea of communism. Although the concept of a communist community is no longer in circulation as a viable political option and is instead relegated to the discourse of the “totalitarianism” of formerly existing communism, the idea of communism seems to be reemerging from a shameful corner, where it has been sitting ever since its liquidation was triumphantly announced as the “end of history.” In its new incarnation communism still signifies what it never ceased to signify for true Marxists—the idea of changing and improving the world, not a destination where bureaucrats install themselves as guardians of the new order.11 However, as an idea whose shy contemplation is still limited to a small group of academics and intellectuals with leftist leanings, it remains to be seen whether it has any credibility left following the debacle of repressive regimes utilizing its name as a cover for their own power schemes. As I have already stated in this book, my main focus of interest, the Balkans, finds itself in an ambiguous position regarding its own position in Europe, in conflict between the ever-weakening promise of the EU and repulsion toward it. Citizens of Greece and Serbia demonstrated their distrust of political elites and their lame promises in the elections held on May 6, 2012, in both countries. While no party recorded victory, the apparent rise Conclusion

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in voters’ trust of the openly profascist Golden Dawn in Greece is indicative of disappointment and anger at the corrupt and debtophiliac policies of the current and preceding governments. A relatively high percentage of the votes given to Golden Dawn should be interpreted more as punishment for the leading parties and their inability to find any viable solution to the debt crisis, than as an alarming veering toward fascism of Greek society as a whole. Meanwhile, the electoral situation in Serbia, in which right-wing sentiment is regularly reheated as symbolic protest against Western politics in Kosovo, or against the Hague Tribunal trials of Serbs indicted as war criminals, is one of general apathy. Poor turnout at the polls in Serbia is characteristic of both the voters’ determination not to award any of the political parties, seen as equally incompetent in solving the country’s most pressing issues, and also of almost fatalistic resignation to the state’s low standard of living, political corruption, and the government’s damaging compromises with the international community, a state of affairs generally dismissed as unalterable. The Serbian electorate seems to no longer believe that change is possible and accepts the truism that nothing ever changes, except the political party in power. This conclusion reflects the current state of affairs in the course of the latest political, economic, and demographic crisis in the Balkans. As European promises grow dimmer even for founding member states, the only alternative to the Balkans joining the EU is generally presented as further regression into some kind of mythical, unenlightened, and ultimately non-European chaos. With elites reiterating the nonexistence of any maneuvering space between joining the EU and facing ultimate exclusion, the Balkans as a whole are compelled to emphatically verbalize and demonstrate their allegiance to ambiguous and oft-repeated “European values.” Greece, which was thought to have held the key to the very survival of the EU monetary system, demonstrated its unwavering commitment to Europe by cutting basic services to its citizens. The rest of the regional economies fare even worse. And although to the impoverished, disillusioned, and generally humiliated populations, neither rigid EU discipline nor the alternative, slipping into proverbial Balkan chaos, looks particularly appealing, so far there has been no consideration of an alternative possibility that would rely on regional cooperation and resources. For a region that is relatively rich in resources and spared extreme climate threats, such cooperation need not be an unreachable goal, but before consciousness emerges of even the possibility of creating such a community, currently confronted ethnopolitical communities need to undertake a thorough and serious process of reconciliation. Like most unthinkable initiatives, this one also begins with intellectuals and artists who share desire and an interest in broader collaboration and

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understanding. In the former Yugoslavia, cultural cooperation suffered in the years during and immediately after the war but has been improving and gaining in meanings and forms that create new “communities of sense.”12 Examples are many, and what they are attempting to achieve is not merely a cultural exchange, though that is not a small achievement in itself. Rather these actions, performances, anthologies, meetings, public readings, festivals, and exhibitions, usually operating entirely outside the official radar and with little or no assistance from institutional bodies, try to effect better understanding and renewed confidence among communities, qualities that can only arrive through a process of reconciliation and mutual respect. Inclusion in these projects of formerly Yugoslav minority communities whose linguistic and cultural specificity was largely ignored in the dominance of the Serbo-Croatian paradigm is one such step. Public debates about crimes committed in the name of communal ideologies, while still facing resistance, also represent a segment in the necessary conversation about the past but also the future of communities whose coexistence in conjoined geographic and cultural space is inevitable. True (Balkan) communities of sense will become possible only upon the realization that the genuine identity of any community lies not in its identification with imaginary ethnoreligious essences, but precisely in the way it memorializes, remembers, or alternatively, ignores, the sacrifices of its own, but even more so of alien bodies destroyed at its threshold.13

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Notes

Introduction: The Legendary Roots of Community Construction Epigraphs: The Building of Skadar, a Serbian epic, collected and recorded by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, in Srpske narodne pjesme [Serbian traditional poetry], vol. 2 (Beograd: Prosveta, 1964), 71–75, translations from Zora Devrnja-Zimmerman, “The Building of Skadar,” in The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 4–12; The Bridge of Arta, version recorded in the Greek tradition and qtd. in Artemis Leontis, “The Bridge between the Classical and the Balkan,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98.4 (1999): 141. 1. Ruth Mandel discusses this aspect of the legend in “Sacrifice at the Bridge of Arta: Sex Roles and the Manipulation of Power,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1 (1983): 173–83. The sacrifice of a wife who has already given birth contests common instances of sacrifice in classical literature, for example, where women who are sacrificed are virgins, not married wives. Rene Girard sees virgins as appropriate victims, residing on the margins of community and not yet integrated social members precisely because they have not been given in marriage. Sacrifice also transforms virgins into women, because as in the act of marriage, they are lawfully given, with their own apparent consent. See Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 2. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 7. 3. Arthur Koestler, for example, defines group identification as a sacrifice of individual critical potential and a creation of artificial unity among group members that ultimately facilitates murder and destruction. It is only in a close-knit group bound by the emotional power of language that the individual becomes capable of homicide. See Arthur Koestler, “The Urge to Self-Destruction,” in The Heel of Achilles (London: Hutchinson, 1974), 11–25. 4. In The Building of Skadar, the nocturnal spirit that symbolically and literally “deconstructs” the power of society/patriarchy and mocks their manhood is a vila, commonly represented as a female who died an unnatural death or incurred God’s wrath and whose vengeful spirit roams free and makes demands upon the community. Although the English translation of vila is “fairy,” this by no means exhausts all the denotations that the word carries in Serbian medieval poetry. Unlike a fairy, a supernatural creature benevolent and helpful to humans, a vila is much less so. 199

Sometimes she is referred to as a gorgeous woman, wronged or betrayed in life, whose spirit seeks vengeance; sometimes she is faceless, as is the case with the Skadar poem, in which she demands the sacrifice of another woman in order to allow for the structure to be built in her realm; sometimes she even physically fights mythistorical heroes. 5. Woman’s body becomes disposable only once it has performed its natural reproductive function, as the immured victim has given birth to a male heir. Following her death, the men can dedicate themselves to their own act of creation, giving “birth” to a political community. 6. Elaine Scarry defines the body as the only material referent for cultural artifacts, otherwise unfounded in material reality: “The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf of a cultural artifact or symbolic fragment or made thing (a sentence) that is without any other basis in material reality: that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis of substantiation.” See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 127. 7. “If the Ireland ‘for which one dies’ existed, . . . one would not be dying [for Ireland].” Likewise, if “the democracy for which one dies existed in a world safe for democracy, one would not be dying to make the world safe for democracy.” See Scarry, Body in Pain, 131–32. 8. The Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinović, one of the sharpest critics of egalitarian tribalism, defined the birth of the banality of the communal spirit on the act of sacrifice. Sacrifice includes both the voluntary suppression of individuality and the forceful imposition of such a unitary model upon others who do not share it. See Radomir Konstantinović, Philosophy of the Provincial Spirit (Beograd: Nolit, 1981). Konstantinović’s work, first published in 1969, gained major significance in the 1980s, when his critique of the banal collective spirit (“provincial,” as he called it) became a possible source for understanding nationalist revivalism in the already disintegrating Yugoslavia. 9. Scarry defines as crisis circumstances in which for all intents and purposes a community or an idea has become “to its population a fiction . . . however intensely beloved by its people that fiction is” (Body in Pain, 131). 10. In her interpretation of Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler rejects crisis as a justification for the broad and systemic use of violence by the modern state against particular individuals or population groups, or “scapegoating,” as she tags it. She defines violence as always racially motivated and as part of a perpetual war against the social body: “racism is more than an ad hoc response to crisis; it is a manifestation of preserved possibilities, the expression of an underlying discourse of permanent social war, nurtured by the biopolitical technologies of ‘incessant purification.’ Racism does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the



200 Notes to Pages 5–7

biopolitical state, woven into the weft of the social body, threaded through its fabric.” See Ann Laura Stoler, qtd. in Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 16. 11. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 4. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. Costica Bradatan explores such voluntary and highly political sacrificial acts in “A Light for the Future: On the Political Uses of a Dying Body,” Dissent (May 2011): http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-light-for-the-future-on-the -political-uses-of-a-dying-body. His examples include Ghandi’s hunger strikes, suicide bombings, and the self-immolation of the Tunisian vendor that served as a catalyst for the Arab Spring. 14. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6. 15. Among the most interesting examples: In 1989, on the six hundredth anniversary of the Kosovo battle, the corpse of the sanctified Serbian medieval ruler killed in the battle, Prince Lazar (in Serbian lore known as “Tzar Lazar”), was carried from Belgrade to Kosovo and then around Serbia in a months-long reassertion of Serbian territorial rights over the mostly Albanian-inhabited province. In Nov. 2009, the burial of the Serbian Orthodox Church patriarch, Pavle, was staged as a state and public event during which the corpse (against all rules of the Serbian Church) was exhibited and carried in an open coffin, accompanied by the highest state and church dignitaries, political and cultural elites, and a mass of people, conveying a clear message of the newly established close ties between state and church authorities in postsocialist Serbia. Dec. 2009 brought the bizarre theft of the corpse of the right-wing Cypriot president Tassos Papadopoulos, which was dug up from its grave and went missing for three months before being found disposed in the graveyard; the point behind this action is still unknown, but it could easily have been of a political nature. Ongoing is the prioritized search for the burial site of the World War II Serbian Royalist Guard commander Colonel Draža Mihajlović, shot by partisan guerillas as a collaborator in 1946. Mihajlović remains a powerful symbol for nationalist and conservative circles, and his body is needed for the purpose of reburial and the final calming of the “divided spirit of Serbia,” as emphasized by the writer and politician Vuk Drašković, one of Mihajlović’s most ardent apologists. The latest example of this kind, albeit from outside the Balkans, is the obscene media spectacle surrounding the corpse of the Lybian dictator Colonel Gaddafi, upon his death in Oct. 2011. 16. Examples of this are too numerous to note in their entirety, but some follow. In the 1980s, with the removal of the taboo regarding nonpartisan World War II victims in Yugoslav politics, numerous mass graves were dug up in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the remains given proper burial. Of particular interest is that

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in the process of reburial the distinction between “victim” and “perpetrator” was obliterated, as families and relatives unearthed the remains of the victims of Croatian Ustashe Nazi units and of postwar partisan executions alike. These macabre events were regularly covered by the media and used to fuel nationalist grievances and resentments. Certainly one of the most recent political manipulations using the posthumous remains of victims of mass murders centered on the still-unknown location of many of the thousands of Bosnian Muslims executed in Srebrenica in 1995. It is important to note that these particular remains are also hostage to political games between the Bosnian and Serbian states, both sides using them, respectively, as evidence to assert or disprove the accusation of genocide. Last but not least is the ongoing investigation into several alleged mass graves of Kosovar Albanians who disappeared during the 1999 NATO bombardment, as well as the international scandal of hundreds of missing Kosovar Serbs and Roma, who are even suspected of having been murdered as part of a chain of organ harvesting operating in the province with the knowledge of leading international political establishments. 17. The Monument Group collective (Grupa spomenik) created an ongoing project called the “Forensic Aesthetic,” focused on placing the spotlight on victims of the massacres of the 1990s’ Yugoslav wars, rather than on causes, perpetrators, or the politics surrounding the counting of war victims. 18. According to Rene Girard, community tends to protect its members by deliberately diverting the necessary violence, whose purpose is to preserve internal order, onto foreigners or socially marginal members. Even the “king,” Girard states, who is by his standing isolated from the collective social texture, is commonly a pertinent as well as a disposable sacrificial offering (Violence and the Sacred, 20–30). 19. The motif of the immurement of human bodies (children, male, and female alike) is by no means alien to non-Balkan cultures, although its background may be different from the one we are exploring here. Many legends of the European Middle Ages utilize the same subject in a fairly similar setting: a king or a nobleman orders the construction of an edifice, a church or a castle, and the process fails endlessly until a human sacrifice is performed on a child, man, or woman whose blood is mixed with the building material. Alan Dundes thus adduces the existence of immured humans in some churches in England and France (Walled-Up Wife). Gothic literature, by many of its characteristics a revival of what was considered horrific and sensational in medieval imagery, likewise teems with bodies, most commonly female, who are buried alive. However, the live-burial motif, fairly common in stories by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, for example, owes more to human fears of being buried alive and to the encroaching development of science in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the deaths of Poe’s immured victims, both male and female, are generally caused by reasons of revenge, fear, or greed. 20. The version most similar to that of The Building of Skadar describes the



202 Notes to Pages 8–9

construction of the Rozafa fortress that overlooks Lake Skadar, divided between contemporary Montenegro and Albania. 21. Mircea Eliade, “Master Manole and the Monastery of Argeş,” in Dundes, Walled-Up Wife, 71–95. 22. Dundes, Walled-Up Wife. 23. Seen as just another process in the creation of centralized authority, the European Union is welcomed by a very similar ironic stance and a lack of enthusiasm. 24. Ernst Gellner presupposes the existence of communities that can represent a response to the nation and its ideologies. See Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Additionally, Anthony D. Smith defines territorially and culturally organized communities as predecessors of modern nationstates. See Anthony D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 25. This is how Benedict Anderson interprets all communities, including the family, in which “disinterested love and solidarity” is best articulated. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 144. For Koestler unselfish devotion to a symbol (flag, anthem) fed by emotional words is the main principle of all organized groups (“Urge to Self-Destruction”). 26. The concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, translated respectively as “community” and “society,” are defined in a classical 1887 sociological text by Ferdinand Tönnies. Gemeinschaft (community) is described as an organization in which the individual’s status is acquired and involves customary responsibility to family and broader community that is equal to or greater than the duty to self-interest. Gesellschaft (society) implies a relatively voluntary union with other members of an entity, primarily guided by self-interest, in which the individual’s status is achieved and legally regulated. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 27. Max Weber’s definition of political community comes closest to the concept of the modern state, as a type of organization that is historically relatively new but that differs from ethnic or religious communities or from “groups” (sports societies, clubs, etc.) merely in “its manifest existence as a well-established power over a considerable territory of land and possibly also sea expanse.” See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 2: 903. With other kinds of communities or groups, political community shares the trait of being based on repression of its own members (“participants” in Weber’s terms) and of being able to readily apply “coercion through jeopardy and destruction of life and freedom of movement applying to outsiders as well as the members themselves” (Economy and Society, 2: 901–3). 28. Robert M. Hayden, “Imagined Communities and Real Victims: SelfDetermination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia,” American Ethnologist 23.4

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(1996): 784. Also see Marina Gržinić, who describes the case of the new Slovenian state erasing the records of approximately thirty thousand nonethnic Slovenians in 1992. She names such legal procedures “administrative genocide.” See Marina Gržinić, “Euro-Slovenian Necrocapitalism,” Transversal (Feb. 2008): http://eipcp .net/transversal/0208/grzinic/en. Zygmunt Bauman likewise recognizes the facilitation of the Holocaust (as any other crime of such magnitude) by those aspects of modernity suppressing violence, irrationality, or antisocial behavior in individuals, which mechanism then creates the state monopoly over the use of violence. Moreover, modernity’s excessive insistence on rationality “divest[ed] the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus,” obfuscating (or merely creating a convenient screen for) self-interrogation about one’s participation in the causal chain of exclusion, discrimination, or even annihilation of other human beings. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 27. 29. In the lectures and writings in which he defines biopower as the weapon of the modern state, Foucault extensively elaborates on various forms of discriminatory discourse and practices of classification, categorization, enumeration, sanitization, and liquidation of bodies, whose common denominator is racism. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 30. For a definition of necropolitics see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. 31. I do not want to repeat the well-known analyses done by Maria Todorova, Dušan Bjelić, and Tomislav Longinović, to mention just a few, of Western media rhetoric during the Yugoslav wars of dissolution. Defining ethnic cleansing and other atrocities that surfaced in that period as inherently Balkan traits unknown to European civilizational standards and human values clearly obfuscated the inconvenient truth that such racist practices lie at the very foundations of each and every European nation-state. Pointing out this fact is intended not to exculpate perpetrators for the atrocities committed in the Yugoslav wars, but merely to emphasize the hypocrisy of the European subject, who likewise conveniently passes over the administrative and legal application of anti-immigrant policies, likewise informed by racist communalism. 32. Balibar transposes racism to the field of culture, by which process culture becomes another determining factor of immutable individual or group identity and thus superior or inferior status, in reality a convenient position for masking established racist practices. See Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” trans. Chris Turner, in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1991), 17–28. 33. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingles discuss the sacrifice of American



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citizens in war campaigns in Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 34. Benjamin Barber most famously discusses these two apparent antagonists, “Jihad” and “McWorld” in his interpretation, as each other’s extensions, equally opposed to democratic governance, which, Barber insists, has no alternative in the modern world. Barber’s Jihad nevertheless still possesses the potential for its own democratic redemption, but only in a form that would exclude terrorism and the sacrifice of the other for its rather muddled goals. Barber finds this democratic potential in the fact that the modern nation-state derives from rather clannish and tribal origins in medieval Europe, a close community that nevertheless was open to democratic dialogue and has been able to make itself part of a larger political union. See Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996). 35. In Protestant Ethnic, Chow situates the ethnic subject in the space of global neoliberal capitalism, obliterates the discursively imposed distinction between ethnicity and race, and demonstrates that they are part and parcel of a common issue— that of class. Also see Dušan Bjelić, “Global Aesthetics and the Serbian Cinema of the 1990s,” in East European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 103–19. 36. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 37. I am borrowing the concept of the feminine from Sue Vice’s perceptive discussion in “Bakhtin and Kristeva: Grotesque Body, Abject Self,” in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, ed. Carol Adlam et al. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 160–74.

Chapter 1. Community, Power, and the Body 1. Luce Irigaray, “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 13. 2. Lisa Walsh, “Writing into the Symbolic: The Maternal Metaphor in Hélène Cixous,” in Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy, and Language, ed. Christina Hendricks and Kelly Oliver (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 350. 3. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (London and New York: Longman, 2000), 266 (my emphasis). 4. Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York, London: Marion Boyars, 1977), 143. 5. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 75. 6. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 15. 7. Lyn Marven adopts just such a concept, Körper-Sprache, from a synthesis of

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Benjamin’s and psychoanalytical theories of language as the ultimate (self-)referent. Marven defines Körper-Sprache as a “literary mode of expression which seeks to undo, or at least to problematize, the dichotomy of discourse and materiality, where the body is the ultimate referent for language.” As a way of writing that is supposed to reveal female alterity, Körper-Sprache is the kind of narrative discourse that made Cixous enthusiastic and Kristeva deeply skeptical. See Lyn Marven, Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 8. Dundes, Walled-Up Wife, 185–206. 9. Rada Iveković, “(Ne)predstavljivost ženskog u simboličnoj ekonomiji: Žene, nacija i rat nakon 1989” [The (un)representability of the female body in symbolic economy: Women, nation, and war after 1989], in Žene, slike, izmišljaji [Women, images, imaginaries], ed. Branka Arsić (Beograd: Centar za ženske studije, 2000), 17. Translations from this text are my own. 10. Ibid., 17. 11. Ibid. 12. Svetlana Slapšak, “Posleratni rat polova” [Postwar gender wars], in Zid je mrtav, živeli zidovi! [The wall is dead, long live walls!], ed. Ivan Čolović (Beograd: Čigoja štampa, 2009), 281–302. Katherine Verdery also discusses the problem of postsocialist familial biopolitics in “From Parent State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 8 (1994): 225–55. Playing with the notion of the “complicity” of the female sex with totalitarian ideologies, Dušan Makavejev’s feminist-revolutionary Milena in WR: Mysteries of the Organism describes a photograph representing Hitler surrounded by women as the moment of ultimate ecstasy and as a record of the fact that “with their blind allegiance, their irrationality, women espouse every ideological delusion on earth.” I discuss Makavejev’s film in the chapter “The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis.” 13. The interest in the reproductive female body is purely political and nationalist. The problem of low birth rates only includes the “native” nation and rarely, if ever minorities, and it never involves immigrant populations, regardless of whether they are legal or illegal. For example, the Serbian demographic crisis disregards the Roma population and is usually measured against the Albanian demographic “explosion.” 14. Alexandra Halkias, The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion and Nationalism in Modern Greece (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2004), 71–80. 15. Rada Iveković considers the female body “unrepresentable, except in the economy of symbolic capital, where the female image and body validate the social order” (“[Ne]predstavljivost ženskog u simboličnoj ekonomiji,” 9). 16. Ibid., 10–13. 17. Dubravka Žarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Žarkov quotes the Serbian weekly NIN, which in one of its issues (Mar. 1990) suggested



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reinforcing the “border chastity belt” at the northern Yugoslav border between the then-Republic of Slovenia and Italy, which was permeable to illegal intruders. In light of the secession of Slovenia, which was already in the air at the time, “illegal intruders” were very much “Western ideas” or “propaganda” that were seen as threatening the coherence of the country more than anything else. 18. Michael Herzfeld finds that Cretan villagers identify female sexuality with pollution. Freedom from sexual contact for men is thus associated with success in battle, while the rape of Turkish women is not even considered sexual because it is “essentially an attack on their husbands.” See Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 159. 19. Žarkov, Body of War, 121. For the duration of the Yugoslav wars, throughout the 1990s, the female body was at the center of media interest once the scale of the campaign of systematic rape of women became known. The Serbian side, which is accused of most of these crimes, equally systematically denied them, except on occasions of rape perpetuated against women of Serbian nationality. Žarkov reports one such instance in an article entitled “Mothers to Someone Else’s children,” which depicts the suffering of Serbian women victims of rape and forced impregnation with the contaminated and contaminating (i.e., not Serbian) ethnicity. The article implies that sexual violation is not even the worst of the brutalities that a woman suffers in war; worst is in fact forced impregnation and the alien child that she will be burdened with for the rest of her life. This shift employs two strategies of ethnic definition by sexual violation: rape defines the “Serbhood of the women,” but forced impregnation defines the “Serbhood of the men” and thus Serbian men as the ultimate victims in this cycle of violence. Jasmila Žbanić’s film Grbavica [The land of my dreams] (2005) is a powerful commentary on the issue. Her protagonist is a Bosnian woman raped and impregnated by Serbian paramilitaries. Sixteen years later and after her daughter discovers the haunting truth of her origin, both women are coming to terms with the fact and relearning to love and respect each other. 20. Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 73. 21. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181. 22. Ibid., 199. 23. Marven, Body and Narrative, 35. 24. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 201. Margaret Alexiou, likewise, recognizes in this sacrifice an act through which the “community’s life triumphs over individual death.” See Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 192. 25. Verdery, “From Parent State,” 242.

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26. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 197. Lamentation for the deceased at funerals is likewise traditionally a women’s activity. Both Margaret Alexiou and Gail Horst-Warhaft offer an elaboration of this cultural phenomenon (still extant in some rural communities in the Balkans), but Horst-Warhaft emphasizes lament’s subversive potential. Besides carrying the ability for provoking revenge and blood feuds, which directly conflict with the state laws looking to suppress them, lament is also strongly oriented toward mourning loss, rather than eulogizing the heroism of the deceased, and thus “denies the value of death” that the community could otherwise appropriate. This was one of the important reasons for curbing or significantly restricting this activity since antiquity. See Gail Horst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002), 104–20. Kristeva likewise recognizes this practice as a space for feminine subversion and “dissidence” from the law of man. Going back to Hegel, who distinguished between “Human Law (that of man, governments, and ethics) and Divine Law (that of women, families, the worship of the dead, and religion),” Kristeva claims that women are the ones to deal with death and contagion precisely because they are “least afraid of death or the law.” Through involvement with this nether space of the human life cycle, women simultaneously administer the ultimate law, the law of death. See Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 296. 27. Bronfen (Over Her Dead Body) presents a strong case for the actual division of social duties in relation to death and burial of the corpse but never fulfills the promise from the opening of her book, dealing with the sacrifice of a woman by patriarchy and for the communal spirit of patriarchy, to explain why the victim must be a woman. The actual female victim is lost amid the interpretations of the significance of death and burial. 28. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 496. 29. On this, see Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London, New York: Verso, 1994), 145–50. 30. Ibid., 148. 31. Slavenka Drakulić, Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 134. 32. Far less frequently than men, women were still perpetrators of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. The Mar. 2011 arrest in the United States of Azra Bašić, accused of unspeakable acts of torture in one of the Croatian-held concentration camps in Bosnia, opens yet another chapter of this war. Mika HaritosFatouros thus perhaps rather optimistically concludes that the Abu-Ghraib torture scandal marks the first time women performed torture alongside their male comrades. See Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Psychological and Sociopolitical Factors Contributing to the Creation of the Iraqi Torturers: A Human Rights Issue,”



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http://security.pr.erau.edu/read.php?kind=html&article_volume=16&article _issue=2&article_title=Psychological%20and%20Sociopolitical%20Factors%20 Contributing%20to%20the%20Creation%20of%20the%20Iraqi%20Torturers:% 20A%20Human%20Rights%20Issue. 33. Branka Arsić, “Queer Serbs,” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 254–77. 34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick interprets homosocial desire as a strategy for the maintenance of patriarchal social structures: “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.” See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 25. 35. Arsić’s text was inspired by the controversy over now decade–old attempts to organize a peaceful Gay Pride parade in Belgrade. Various “patriotic” organizations have for years successfully manipulated the excuse of the parade to promote their political interests and hold captive both the government and citizens with the threat of orchestrated violence and unleashed hooliganism they have employed on important occasions of a different nature in the past. Under the guise of protection of the family and public morality, the most radically right-wing and openly fascist elements and organizations have been recruited to stage violence and “defend” the nation against homosexuality as one more weapon in the arsenal of “foreign evils” sent by its enemies to destroy Serbia. False preoccupation with the survival of the nation is employed in justifying the venting of pent-up aggression among the strata of the undereducated, unemployed, and wasted male population brought up in the shadow of international isolation and war during the decade of the 1990s, a time of rabid propagation and glorification of violence and crime in the media and in political life. The symbolic of the homosexual body in this case represents the dread of tolerance of difference, as well as of the right to voice discordant opinions. 36. The male pact thus murders not its ultimate other, but part of itself. See Mandel, “Sacrifice at the Bridge of Arta,” 165. 37. Bjelić, “Global Aesthetics and the Serbian Cinema,” 107. 38. Iveković likewise notices that such impositions on the female body in fact serve to regulate male homoerotic desire, but only within the context of community, not society. Society is not seen as providing a framework for male-male sexual desire, as is the case with community. 39. In her analysis of Calvino’s story, Teresa de Lauretis refers to the men’s mutual desire as the “spiritus movens” of history. See Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984).

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40. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (New York and London: Penguin, 1993), 22–25. 41. In fact, homosocial bonding historically tends to be carefully distinguished from homosexuality, which was perceived as evidence of a man’s femininity or even as proof of the existence of a “third sex.” Some pre-Nazi male societies advocated the legalization of the ancient Greek “model” of pederasty and the “exchange” of ideas between adult men and their adolescent followers. Such homoeroticism barred homosexuals, as pederasty was not considered a feminine trait, but one of overt masculinity and thus appropriate only to “normal men.” See Harry Oosterhuis, “Male Bonding and Homosexuality in German Nationalism,” Journal of Homosexuality 22.1 (1992): 240–45. Klaus Theweleit and John Borneman likewise oppose the view that homosexuality, even latent, could be the foundation of either patriarchal social order or its communal/institutional outlets. They distinguish between homosexuality and anal intercourse. Homosexuality is not simply a matter of preference and desire directed at the same-sex object (which is a justification of homosexual marriage, for example), but represents pure “desire to desire” in opposition to social reproduction; as such it will expectedly be persecuted by any conservative or fascist ideology. The other kind of male-to-male sex is anal intercourse, which has little or nothing to do with desire but has always been used as an act of aggression against the object, with the intention of his “devivification,” humiliation, or destruction. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 2: 309–20; John Borneman, Subversions of International Order: Studies in Political Anthropology of Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 282–300. I discuss the latter aspect of male rape in the chapter “The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis.” 42. In “Male Bonding and Homosexuality,” Oosterhuis notes Himmler’s warning of a “too powerful masculinization and militarization” of the Nazi movement, which threatened to become a breeding ground for homosexuality, since young men had few chances to meet members of the opposite sex. Underlying this is fear about community reproduction should homosexuality seriously undermine the heterosexual family. 43. L. George Mosse discusses the ethicization of body aesthetics in Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985). 44. John Borneman discusses this compensatory mechanism in Subversions of International Order, 280–96. 45. Writing about the use of the body in socialist art, Bojana Pejić diagnoses a distinct threat contained in the naked male body. She quotes Pawel Leszkowicz, who comments on the absence of male nakedness in Polish socialist art: “Naked women could be seen quite often, but a naked man was in the socialist culture an absolute taboo (and he still is, by the way, even now), something unimaginable and intolerable.



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Male genitals in themselves had been a challenge to all restrictions, a symptom of anarchy—their presence has been censored as strictly as the most subversive political tendencies.” See Bojana Pejić, “Unmaking Sex: Bodies of/in Communism,” in Wounds: Between Redemption and Democracy in Contemporary Art (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998), 73. 46. The UN reports only very rare occurrence of data on the widespread practice of sexual violations of male bodies in the Bosnian war. Very little academic engagement or expert attention has been given to the problem, and even those who occasionally mention it in their work only do so in passing, without any elaboration. Systematic sexual violence against men thus becomes “invisible”; even the stories that did get reported in the media of the time describe various other forms of torture against men in the tiniest detail, while giving only the briefest and most schematic accounts of the fact of male rape (Žarkov, Body of War, 155–59). John Borneman quotes psychiatric assessments of the male victims of rapes and mutilations in the Yugoslav wars as clear cases of the projection of imaginary racial or gender otherness on the enemy and their consequent dehumanization and destruction: “These violent sexual acts, then, cannot be understood only as ‘violence against women,’ for they involve a more general violence against an other-identified people—a genocide.” See Borneman, Subversions of International Order, 291. 47. This is how Kristeva designates the feminine otherness. See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 48. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2: 87. 49. Volumes could be written about the ongoing debate on women’s reproductive rights that took place in the sphere of American politics during the 2012 election campaign. The sheer amount of commentary on the subject proves that the female body is still a very contested topic, especially in the “developed world’s” more conservative political communities. The range of commentaries themselves unfortunately demonstrates a high level of bias, ignorance, and downright intolerance of any image of woman other than a patriarchal and family-oriented one. It is also not accidental that such a debate (conducted almost exclusively by the male political elite) should be conducted at a time of veritable national emergency, compounding the crisis of the economy (for all but the elite) and heated debate about immigrant rights, at a point when class confrontation threatens to turn ugly. 50. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2: 87. 51. Ibid., 2: 87 (my emphasis). 52. Julie Mostov, “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body: Politics of National Identity in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 96. 53. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).

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54. Žarkov, Body of War, 162. 55. Vice, “Bakhtin and Kristeva: Grotesque Body, Abject Self,” 160–74. 56. Ibid., 165. 57. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82. 58. Just how broadly this heterogeneity can be considered is well illustrated in the following: “In early Nazi Germany those were, in order of appearance, the mentally ill and challenged, communists, union leaders, Gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, vagrants, ruffians, the work/shy, asocials, prostitutes, those suffering from veneral diseases, psychopaths, ‘traffic offenders,’ ’fault finders,’ and in the end, Jews.” See Sofsky, qtd. in Neni Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 91. Andrew Norris transposes it onto the Holocaust: “Sacrifice is the performance of the metaphysical assertion of the human: the Jew, the Gypsy, and the gay man die that the German may affirm his transcendence of his bodily, animal life.” See Andrew Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” introduction to Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 10. 59. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 26–27 (my emphasis). 60. Foucault writes about it in Discipline and Punish, Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 61. Citing Hegel, Kojève recognizes this antagonistic desire as the very condition for the creation of humanity: “Hegel says that the being that is incapable of putting its life in danger in order to attain ends that are not immediately vital—i.e. the being that cannot risk its life in a Fight for Recognition, in a fight for pure prestige—is not a truly human being.” On the other hand, Barthes’s concept of “the non-will to possess” conceptualizes a different desire, opposed to the violent kind Kojève describes. More on this can be found in Nikolaj Lübecker, Community, Myth and Recognition in Twentieth-Century French Literature and Thought (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 15. 62. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy C. Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 8. 63. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 1991), 3. 64. For further discussion of this subject, see Paul Hegarty, “Supposing the Impossibility of Silence and of Sound, of Voice,” in Norris, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 222–28; Jesse Goldhammer, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in



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Modern French Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 154–70; and Peter Burger, The Thinking of the Master: Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 28–30. 65. Georges Bataille illustrates his argument with the example of the Native American potlach custom, which consists of giving away excessive gifts for the purpose of “humiliating” the receiver and putting him in debt to the donor. His other poignant example is mass sacrifices performed by the Aztecs. Festivals, parades, and wars are all part of this same paradigm of the destruction of excessive “value.” Bataille develops this idea in The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 19–80. 66. Ibid., 24. 67. Marcuse long ago criticized excessive consumerism as a principle of capitalist production, as well as its self-perpetuation through the production of desire. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. Slavoj Žižek also takes on this issue in “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1992), 193–207. 68. The Nazi obsession with corporeal health resulted in a dialectics of the representation of disabled bodies isolated for sacrifice, versus those whose reintegration into the healthy community was still possible. Cf. documentaries showing sick and disabled patients (usually epileptic or psychiatric cases), propagating euthanasia for such undesirable (albeit Aryan) bodies, with those showing amputees happily exercising, playing football, or swimming, clearly “redeemed” for the healthy nation. For an excellent account of the medical management of the Nazi extermination campaign, see esp. Roberto Esposito’s account of “thanatopolitics” in Bios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 69. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 205–13. 70. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 137. 71. Yael S. Feldman, in her Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), explains the significance in the Hebrew culture of the fact that Hebrew only has one word, qorban, denoting both “sacrifice” and “victim.” According to Feldman, this fact informs the nature of Jewish nationalism, in which there is no linguistic distinction between the active, heroic act of sacrifice and passive victimization (exclusion), which caused the latter to be relegated to a negative and gendered form of inaction. In many Slavic languages (as well as in the languages of the former Yugoslavia) the word žrtva causes identical ethical and psychological quandaries, since it likewise designates both meanings. In Greek the distinction is between two close derivations: thyma for “victim” and thysia for “sacrifice.”

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72. Marvin and Ingles, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, 2. 73. Patrick Ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (London: Maney Publishing, 2007), 5–6.

Chapter 2. A Failed Dream of a Balkan Community Epigraph: Nikos Kazantzakis, quoted in Peter Bien, Politics of the Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 19. 1. It is needless to repeat that another myth resurrected in the period and frequently interpreted as synonymous with the Balkans is that of the vampire. 2. Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble, “The Ballad of the ‘Walled-Up Wife’: Its Structure and Semantics,” in Dundes, Walled-Up Wife, 177. 3. This latter interpretation is the one preferred by folklorists like Mircea Eliade, for example, who read the sacrificial motif as an instance of death necessiatated by the birth of something new. 4. Olga Augustinos, “Arches of Discord, Streams of Confluence: The Building of Bridges in the Balkans,” in The Other Self: Selfhood and Society in Modern Greek Fiction, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (New York and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), 156. Augustinos defines three stages of “stone and word” construction in the legends of immurement and their literary renditions: separation, transition, and integration, which resemble the three stages through which the sacrificial victim passes on her way to the world of the dead: “First, by his intrusion man separated himself from nature. Retribution was demanded in order for this division to be bridged. Before the final appeasement, there was a period of transition when the immured victim occupied two domains, the human and the natural, where the animate and the innanimate intersected. It was a moment of liminality and as such, a moment of ambiguity and unset definition, a treshold leading from the turbulent state of humanness to the immobile state of legend.” 5. During the Yugoslav wars many a self-proclaimed expert on things Balkan directed readers to the opus of Ivo Andrić for a better understanding of the “Balkan” crisis. It was supposed to reveal to the uninitiated reader the sources of ethnoreligious resentments that regularly result in repetitive cycles of wars and massacres. However, Andrić’s writings are possibly the last place the confused reader should have looked for an instant confirmation of the primitivism and intolerance of the Balkan population. Instead of being a kind of a “truth book” regarding the backwardness of local cultures, his work treats local folklore without bias, with understanding and even benevolence. More often than not it records the external political influences of various big powers over the region that instigate or exploit existing cultural differences for the purpose of promoting their strategic and economic interests. This not at all insignificant fact of foreign involvement and clashing interests in the



214 Notes to Pages 44–48

immediate postsocialist period is the one aspect of the Yugoslav crisis that was rarely if ever discussed throughout the ordeal of the 1990s. 6. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 152 (my emphasis). 7. The video project Most (Bridge, 2000) by the contemporary artist Dragana Žarevac, about the destruction of the Ottoman-built bridge in the Bosnian town of Mostar by Croatian forces in Nov. 1993, emphasizes this aspect of the deliberate disruption of communication and the forceful delineation of borders between communities. Yet in Žarevac’s video montage, the bridge continues to live even though it is physically nonexistent, as the incessant sound of happy voices in the background of the video renders this division impossible. See http://blip.tv/gasprod/dragana -zarevac-most-347510 (accessed Feb. 2013). (The video project was made before the reconstruction of the bridge in 2004.) The NATO bombardment that took place over seventy-eight days between Mar. and June 1999 was, among other things, characterized by an almost obsessive targeting of bridges by NATO forces; no fewer than fifty-four were destroyed in the campaign. See Evangelos Calotychos, “From Arta to NATO: Building and Bombing Bridges in the Balkans,” in Ritual Poetics in Greek Culture, ed. P. Roilos and D. Yatromanolakis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 227–44. Many interpreted the NATO campaign in particular as an action with a set goal of the positioning of the alliance’s troops in the region for the purpose of further expansion—a claim that is hard to argue considering the secrecy surrounding Bondsteel, one of its largest military bases, erected only weeks after the bombing campaign ended. 8. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 128–40. 9. Bien, Politics of the Spirit, 15. 10. Nikos Kazantzakis [pseud., Petros Psiloritis], O protomastoras [The Master Builder] (Athens: Panathinaion, 1910). Kazantzakis published this play under the pseudonym Petros Psiloritis in 1910. It was turned into an opera by the composer Manolis Kalomiris (1912). All quotations from this text were taken from my adaptation of a rough translation of the play provided by Peter Bien. 11. The murder of Iphigenia clearly facilitates her father’s (and her nation’s) military conquest. Agamemnon seeks purported public consensus for the crime by literally committing a crime against himself. The young girl, about to be slain on the altar of goddess Artemis for the sake of Greece’s imperialist enterprise—sold to the masses as a punitive campaign for the abduction of beautiful Helen—begs her father, King Agamemnon, to spare her. The father is above all a king accountable to the thousands of men who, after months of idling in the sun getting ready for action that never happened, are calling outside the king’s compound for blood and murder. Agamemnon helplessly explains to his daughter: “That rage of my army is not against you, child,

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but a mad rage to sail to the barbarian land, to quash them and put an end to their rape of our women . . . Greek women . . . Greek wives . . . Greek daughters defiled. Greek men will not permit that most loathsome of crimes. It is not for Helen, not for Menelaus I sacrifice you, it is for Greece. She must be free. If it is in our power, yours and mine, to make her so, we must.” See Euripides, Medea and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38. As the men, who are themselves soon to be sacrificed to the vague ideal of the “freedom” of a nation that is not even under attack (they are probably dying for “Greece” and will soon be raping barbarian womenfolk in order to put an end to the rape of their women), ominously close in on the king’s house and promise to drag Iphigenia to the sacrifice if she resists, the poor girl realizes that the only option remaining at her disposal is to submit herself and die with whatever dignity is left and be celebrated for her sacrifice for Greece. Either way, she is already dead. Her body is a channel that makes possible the campaign in which she is neither participant nor beneficiary, but no other sacrificial offering save for her body will do. In many ways, therefore, her sacrifice is a symbolic one of the sacred body in the sense in which sacred is commonly used: invested with symbolic meaning outside of the ordinary and specifically designated for the purpose of sacrificial offering to the gods. 12. Peter Bien, “Kazantzakis’ The Masterbuilder, with an Additional Note on Capodistrias,” Literary Review 18 (1975): 406. 13. After the play’s publication Kazantzakis publicly defended it from literary critics in an angry article entitled “Ragiades” (from rayah, crowd), printed in the daily Acropolis, June 21, 1910. See Teodoras Papahatzaki-Katsaraki, To theatriko ergo tou Nikou Kazantzaki [The theatrical works of Nikos Kazantzakis] (Athens: Dodoni, 1985), 39. 14. F. W. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56. 15. See Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 149. 16. This is precisely the male creativity that Camille Paglia defines as necessarily female free and taking place in the short span of a man’s life that falls between the influences of mother and wife (see chapter 1). 17. Carol Delaney, “Father State, Motherland and the Birth of Modern Turkey,” in Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (New York: Routledge, 1994), 179. This point is arguable, of course, especially in light of later Greek claims of territorial expansion based on the ancient Hellenic influence of the Ottoman territories, as well as the large Orthodox population that sided with the Greek nationalist struggle during the 1920s. 18. Delaney, “Father State,” 186. Delaney states that “only men really have families; women are just part of one” (178). Delaney further claims that the nation arises



216 Notes to Pages 52–55

from kinship ties, just like religion, rather than ideological ties. The nation’s emotional appeal lies precisely in this fact, which overrides any rational justification for this kind of communal organization. 19. Inseparable from this is the logic of the permeability of territorial boundaries, which calls for the enforcement of strict laws and defense against intruders, a point I already discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the symbolic of the female body. Kristeva’s notion of the abject female body is likewise a productive metaphor in the sense that it is the body’s natural permeability of boundaries and susceptibility to contagion (intercourse and offspring with the unwanted other) that calls for the imposition of drastic measures for its protection. 20. The bridge keeps reappearing as the site of historical memory in other writings by Andrić: The Bridge on the Žepa (1931) and the collection of nonfiction prose Bridges (1933). 21. Radovan Vučković, Velika sinteza o Ivi Andriću [The grand synthesis about Ivo Andrić] (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1974), 288. 22. Janissaries were Ottoman foot soldiers used as frontline fighters and were notorious for their cruelty. Their ranks were exclusively filled with boys periodically taken at an early age from occupied territories in special actions of collecting “blood tribute” (devshirme) and trained for the purpose. Their cruelty is generally attributed to the fact that they never knew family life and were unable to form attachments. Upward mobility in the Ottoman Empire in general was not limited, however, and there were many known cases of gifted individuals who excelled during their service, reaching the highest rank available to men of nonaristocratic origin, that of grand vizier. 23. Leontis, “Bridge between the Classical and the Balkan,” 647. 24. Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge, trans. John Hodgson (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), 23. 25. Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 36. The archetypal figure of the storyteller, guslar, is in most if not all Serbian epic poetry a blind man. He “sings” his stories by the fire playing the gusle, a string instrument producing a monotone sound that is only the backdrop for his singing. 26. Ironically, one of the stories circulating about the missing body of Ivan Stambolić, the kidnapped and murdered political opponent of Slobodan Milošević, before his arrest in 2000, was that he was immured into a supporting pillar of a bridge near the city of Novi Sad. The body was found years later at a different location. 27. Andrić, Bridge on the Drina, 47. 28. Petar Džadžić interprets this figure as a classical water demon confined inside the structure, whose vengeful nature always remains a threat to the unnatural edifice that trapped the river. Andrić describes the whole chain of circumstantial events that

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lead to his immurement in the bridge and that, despite the novel’s ironic stance on the sacrificial victim, introduces a strong mythical-ritualistic component that persists in the collective unconscious: the ropes holding the stone block give way “for no known reason” (Bridge on the Drina, 63); among many workers on the site, the only mason hurt is the black one: “By a strange chance the block fell exactly into position” (63) and buried only his lower body. The Arab is thus transformed into a dark ghost that inhabits the bridge at ungodly hours and is only “visible” to people whose rational powers are questionable: drunkards and village idiots. Mothers also use him to scare their misbehaving children. Yet he permanently remains part of the collective mythical consciousness, and almost by design the site of his death is the exact place where the Austrians open a hole to store the explosives, which finally leads to the bridge’s destruction at the end of the novel. See Petar Džadžić, Hrastova greda u kamenoj kapiji: mitsko u Andrićevom delu [An oak plank in the stone gate: The mythical in Andrić’s opus] (Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1983), 85–110. Likewise, in an index of collected exotiká from the Greek regions, Charles Stewart lists a demon popularly known as Arápis: “a bogey feared by children. He is said to smoke a long pipe, wear iron shoes, and guard haunted treasures.” See Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 251. 29. Dragan Kujundžić, “Ivo Andrić and the Sarcophagus of History,” in Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich (Berkeley: International Area Studies, 1995), 107. 30. Ibid., 104. 31. Ibid., 106. For the sake of accuracy, the last female victim that Andrić records on his bridge is the girl Fata, who, torn between her own pride and obedience to her father, rides her horse off the bridge and into the Drina. Her suicide takes place while her wedding procession is crossing the bridge and before the vows are taken. She remains true to herself by not marrying the man she dislikes yet does not disobey her father either, as she participates in the ceremony up to that point. This is emblematic of the conflict of loyalties between her desires and societal expectations/duties, death being the only escape from the grave implications entailed in accommodating either of the two. 32. Andrić, Bridge on the Drina, 90. A couple of centuries after the bridge was finished, a new “sacrificial” place was erected in the middle of the bridge, at the former meeting spot of kapia and exactly above the middle pillar, which forever holds the buried lower body of the Arab worker. In his mythical interpretation of the novel’s motives, Džadžić sees this Ottoman “headsman” as another incarnation of the Arab, a chthonic demon forever seeking revenge for his death. 33. Mandel, “Sacrifice at the Bridge of Arta.” 34. Zoran Milutinović, “Mašina prolazi kroz Višegrad: Društvena modernizacija



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i književno-istorijski modernizam u Na Drini ćuprija” [The machine passes through Višegrad: Social modernization and literary-historical modernism in The Bridge on the Drina], Sveske of Andrić’s Legate 21 (2004): 103 (my translation). 35. Ibid., 101–3. 36. The whole of the Balkans are now finding themselves in a situation very much like this in the face of potential full membership in the EU; the regime transformation portrayed in Andrić’s novel bears comparison with that between the previous (much spoken of and ridiculed) communist bureaucracy and the new pro-European one. Despite the fact that many of the new regulations to which the future member states have to conform in order to join the EU make little or no sense at all to the population (or common sense, for that matter) but represent a progressive intrusion into their privacy and seriously hamper their already low financial capability, these dictates are imposed with blind disinterest by the local governments, whose main strength is that they have grown quite skillful in advertizing themselves as “modern” authorities, built on the “democratic European” model. Needless to say, the whole enterprise is causing growing skepticism at a time when the EU project has been all but abandoned, and only the continent’s poorest are still clinging to its promise. 37. In what is threatening to become an overload of symbolism, Archduke Ferdinand, the only heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo beside yet another bridge, after a whole set of unfortunate and ominous mishaps that plagued the royal visit to the city. One of the widespread half-truths about this event that circulated during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s was that the heir to the throne was assassinated by a “Serb,” supposedly as evidence of this ethnicity’s collective historical responsibility and penchant for undermining peaceful cohabitation in Bosnia. In truth, Gavrilo Princip, who succeeded in his assassination attempt after two failed attempts by his fellow conspirators, was only one of seven people who lined the car route with the intention of committing the act at the first given opportunity. They were members of a pro-Yugoslav revolutionary group whose members belonged to different Bosnian ethnic and religious communities. The other broadly circulated semitruth about this act—which different sides variously interpret as either “revolutionary” or “terrorist,” although there are contradictory opinions about almost every such event, and this one is no exception—was that the archduke’s assassination “started World War I.” Such claims are as dangerous as they are ignorant of the decades-long legacy of wars, political games, and open blackmail to which virtually all of the Balkan freshly liberated nations were exposed by the major European powers. 38. Andrić, Bridge of the Drina, 240. 39. Ibid., 307. 40. Ibid., 312. 41. His novel The Castle (1970), which fictionalizes the medieval hero Skender-Bey

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through the same binary, is perhaps the most poignant example of this undesirable tendency, which pervades many of Kadare’s historical novels written during the decade of the 1970s. 42. Kadare, Three-Arched Bridge, 104. 43. Ibid., 124. 44. Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception (New York: Continuum, 2006), xx. 45. Even Stalin, Žižek claims, the greatest manipulator in history, could not have committed the horrors he did out of pure cynicism, but only out of the desire to believe that his notion of the “world filled with enemies was basically correct” (quoted in ibid., xix). To bring the metaphor home: Can we with any seriousness claim that the Western public (or its leaders) believed that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”? And was that “fact” really the reason for the war? Still, that same Western public did little to protest and even less to prevent the Iraq War. The entire drama of pseudo-negotiations with the Iraqis was primarily staged for that semblance of public consensus. The attack was imminent; the only thing missing was a false public consensus. Even now, when the truth of the Iraq War, U.S. prison torture, and the corruption of the entire economic structure profiting from it is in plain sight, the general level of conformity is such that events fail to draw any other reaction than a bit of orderly, civil protest, never transgressing the strict boundaries of the law. 46. Arguably one of the most fascinating literary examples of staging appearances for the satisfaction of the big Other is found in the episode of the confession fabrication in Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1974), trans. Duška Mikić-Mitchell (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001). 47. Žižek ascribes it to communism, although it can be extended to most societies founded on repressive cohesion. 48. Žižek, Universal Exception, 141. 49. Ibid., 141. 50. Kadare, Three-Arched Bridge, 184. 51. In his post-1990 biography Kadare tried to attenuate the fact that he was to a certain extent a beneficiary of the Enver Hoxha regime and that he left Albania only after the regime change. There has been so much suspicion about his activities in communist Albania that even the poem known as “The Red Pashas,” on account of which he was sent to internal exile to work the soil and forget writing, was considered a fabrication until the original emerged in an archive. See Peter Morgan, Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 1957–1990 (London: Legenda, 2010). The extent of his collusion with the regime remains one of the controversial points in his biography and possibly one of the reasons why for a long time he has been mentioned as “the next in line” for the Nobel Prize but has never actually won it. 52. Ismail Kadare, Dialogue avec Alain Bosquet (Paris: Fayard, 1995). Many critics



220 Notes to Pages 65–68

of Kadare’s work consider that his choice of a historical event as an alleged screen for political critique was a safe option, being fairly nontransparent to his readership but also to the censors. See Noel Malcolm, “In the Palace of Nightmares: A Review of Ismail Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge,” New York Review of Books 44.17 (1997). 53. One of the most accessible of these apologies is Kadare, Dialogue avec Alain Bosquet. 54. Although the evidence of this link is present in the original text of the novel, some critics fail to credit Kadare for it and instead insist that this is another of his apologetic postcommunism explanations (Malcolm, “In the Palace of Nightmares”). 55. The novel itself was published at the climax of the Yugoslav dissolution wars, during the NATO bombardment of Serbia in 1999. 56. Fakinos exiled himself to France upon the seizure of power by the military junta in Greece in the 1970s; he died there, never returning to Greece. His entire oeuvre derives from Greek collective memory and epic history, but nowadays he tends to be mainly forgotten by Greek audiences. 57. Aris Fakinos, To oneiro tou protomastora Nikita [The dream of Master Builder Nikitas] (Athens: Kastanioti, 1998), 34 (all translations of this text are my own). 58. Ibid., 93–94. 59. Ibid., 55–56. 60. Ibid., 143. 61. Ibid., 181. 62. Ibid., 231. 63. The entire decade of the 1990s in the Balkans represents a time of mushrooming mythologies, some reiterating centuries-old bias about the region, some modified to suit the new circumstances. Rampant nationalism, chauvinist kitsch, and fabricated traditions became an important focus of everyday life and an alleged defense against the threat of the Westernization of local values, not only in the formerly Yugoslav space, officially at war at the time, but in the neighboring nations as well. 64. Joseph Mali discusses mythistorical narratives in Mythistory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1. 65. Ivo Andrić, Conversation with Goya, trans. Celia Hawkesworth and Andrew Harvey (London: Menard Press, 1992), 16 (my emphasis). 66. See Andrew Wachtel, “The Archeology of Andrić’s Narrative,” in Vucinich, Ivo Andrić Revisited, 85. 67. Andrić, Bridge on the Drina, 238. 68. Ibid., 238. 69. Peter Bien, “Inventing Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 23 (2005): 218. 70. Gregory Jusdanis likewise observes that “nationalist discourse, with its tales of progress, self-fulfilment, and manifest destiny, allows modern individuals to deny

Notes to Pages 68–72

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their mortality in the face of change.” See Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 165. 71. Andrić, Bridge on the Drina, 71. 72. Ibid., 326. 73. This scene refers to the historic destiny of the Balkans, always caught in a death trap of their own differences and resentments, which were ultimately manipulated by greater powers. Danis Tanović utilizes this allegory in his film No Man’s Land (2001), where the wounded Bosnian fighter wakes up lying on a booby-trap mine produced in the EU. 74. Andrić, Bridge on the Drina, 311–12. 75. Ibid., 313–14. 76. One of the oddities of Albanian communism was the construction of around seven hundred thousand cement bunkers to protect the country from foreign invasion. At a time when Albanians had no cement to bind the brickwork in their houses, the regime was splurging on pillbox-shaped bunkers. 77. Enver Hoxha’s historical nostalgia in sustaining the continuity of the modern Albanian nation and its mythistorical ancestors ended with the arrival of the Ottomans. The rest was dutifully sacrificed to the communist New Age. 78. For an excellent analysis of Kadare’s orientalizing discourse, not only in this novel but in his entire opus, see Julia Musha, “Where Europe Begins: Ismail Kadare’s The Three-Arched Bridge and the Contemporary Albanian Debate on European Integrations,” in Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans, ed. Tatjana Aleksić (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 69–82. Musha traces the existence of the “Europe vs. Islam” dichotomy in much of his work and notices that Kadare is becoming increasingly Eurocentric in light of recent political developments that will enable Albania to enter the EU. 79. Hoxha infamously exploited his own paranoid fear of Tito and the Yugoslav state’s alleged plot against Albanian sovereignty to crack down on his opposition at home. On the other hand, the Yugoslavs accused Hoxha of interfering with the Albanians in Kosovo and creating a problem in the province, which escalated in the early 1980s. 80. Morgan, Ismail Kadare, 193. By Kadare’s own admission there was no institutionalized censorship in Albania during the Enver Hoxha dictatorship; however, writings were frequently condemned and banned postpublication. 81. Ibid., 165–73. 82. Ajkuna is an archetype like Kazantzakis’s Village Mother, a remnant of the ancient mythological past whose fateful predictions command respect and fear among the people of the village. In contrast to the Mother, Ajkuna curses the bridge. As soon as the tacit prohibition inferred by her curse not to cross the bridge is broken



222 Notes to Pages 73–77

and the first locals cross to the other side, the Ottoman soldiers follow, but that does not stop the ever-steadier flow of people across the new structure. 83. Kujundžić, “Ivo Andrić and the Sarcophagus of History,” 112. 84. Fakinos, Το oneiro tou protomastora Nikita, 239.

Chapter 3. The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament 1. Anne McClintock, “Fanon and Gender Agency,” in Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 283–93. 2. Dimitris Tziovas, “’Moscóv-Selim’ and The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Narratives of Identity and the Semiotic Chora,” in Tziovas, Other Self. Tziovas offers a good sample of the dialectical oppositions on which the novel is based. 3. The term signifies a crosslike structure clad in human clothes for ritual purposes, as depicted in the novel. Otherwise, participants carry flamboura, remnants of Byzantine standards, around churches on important religious holidays. 4. Megali idea (the big idea) is a common referent to the nationalist sentiments of Greek elites, which regarded the former Byzantine territories as a logical extension of the modern Greek nation-state. The military campaign for the “liberation” of the population and territories that belonged to modern Turkey following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent Greek defeat by the consolidated Turkish army, culminated in one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century, in Greek history usually referred to as the “Catastrophe” of 1922. 5. Rhea Galanaki, The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina nel cuore, trans. Kay Cicellis (London: Peter Owen, and Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1996), 145. Theo Angelopoulos utilizes this image in his film Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), when during the New Year’s celebration scene A., the Greek American director revisiting his family home in Romania, appears as a child in the group picture taken on the occasion. This can suggest relations in which the child is treated as a child even when a grown man, but equally relations of a less benevolent kind, in which no achievement by the offspring is ever deemed satisfactory to the family’s high expectations. 6. More on this may be found in Tatjana Aleksić, “The Sacrificed Subject of Rhea Galanaki’s Ismail Ferik Pasha,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 27.1 (May 2009): 31–54. 7. Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 93. 8. Ibid., 136. 9. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9. 10. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 212. 11. Cf. Tatjana Rosić, Mit o savršenoj biografiji [The myth of a perfect biography] (Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2008).

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12. Ibid., 29. 13. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 31. 14. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 147. 15. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 71–72. 16. Ibid., 72. 17. Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 97. 18. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 148. 19. McClintock, “Fanon and Gender Agency,” 283. 20. Athanasia Sourbati, “Reading the Subversive in Contemporary Greek Women’s Fiction” (PhD diss., King’s College London, 1992), 124. 21. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 191–92. 22. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 206. 23. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 192. 24. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 45. 25. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York and London: Norton, 1989), 557. 26. Tziovas, “‘Moscóv-Selim,’” 254. 27. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 147. 28. Rosić, Mit o savršenoj biografiji, 25–27. 29. Derrida, Gift of Death, 75. 30. Butler and Wittig, for example, interpret masculinity as a social and discursive universal, the measure and standard of social organization. It is by this definition a nongender, the only gender being feminine, or “the other one,” which is automatically converted into society’s (as defined by normative masculine) absolute other. The woman is thus relegated to the other side of everything that society represents: from culture to nonparticipation in political space. 31. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 11. 32. Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29. 33. In the relationship between Ismail and Ibrahim, Calotychos recognizes an ambiguity by which Ibrahim is at times referred to in sexual terms, at other times as the one who “had mothered” Ismail’s second life. See Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 273. 34. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 99. 35. Ibid., 45 (my emphasis). 36. Ibid., 24. 37. Butler, Gender Trouble, 30. 38. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 83.



224 Notes to Pages 87–95

39. A host of texts explores gendered colonialist discourse, but it suffices to go back to Edward Said’s Orientalism, especially chapter 2.IV, “Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French” (New York: Vintage, 1979), 166–200. 40. Georgia Gotsi, “A Garment of One’s Own: Eugenia Fakinou’s Re-Imagining of the Greek Past, Mediterranean Historical Review 15.2 (2000): 92. 41. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Placing Women’s History in History,” New Left Review 133 (1982): 7. 42. The pre-Homeric mythologies focus on fertility to reflect the natural universe in an attempt to simplify its complexity and offer an explanation thereof. Olympian mythology, in contrast, posits the male-oriented and male-dominated pantheon, presided over by the arch-deity Zeus, whose power was assured by the universal act of violence against the old order—gigantomachia. 43. Eugenia Fakinou, The Seventh Garment, trans. Ed Emery (London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1991), 7. 44. Sourbati, “Reading the Subversive,“ 40. 45. In the opening Roula has a premonition of what is to happen by dreaming of an unknown blond man’s head on the pillar—most likely Fotos’s. Likewise, Mana sees everywhere the head of her first husband, Andronikos, and talks to it. The men are thus symbolically removed from their traditional roles, which opens the door to the creation of a unique women’s space. 46. Fakinou, Seventh Garment, 51. 47. Thomas Doulis, Disaster and Fiction: Modern Greek Fiction and the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 5. Also see Dimitra Giannuli, “Greeks or ‘Strangers at Home’: The Experiences of Ottoman Greek Refugees during Their Exodus to Greece, 1922–1923,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 13.2 (Oct. 1995): 271–87. Giannuli discusses this problem from the aspect of the refugees’ political organization and religious practices. Some authors find not only that the newcomers received a less than enthusiastic welcome by mainland Greeks but that they also perceived themselves as distinctly different from (and frequently superior to) their hosts even many decades after their exodus. The newcomers created and maintained a separate identity based on their collective memory of the Ottoman homeland, which was distinct from the experience of Ottoman colonization in the mainland Greek territories. Reneé Hirschon, for example, draws similar conclusions in her investigation of the Asia Minor refugee settlements in the suburbs of Piraeus, conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Hirschon, the inhabitants of the settlement referred to themselves as “refugees” (prosfiges) six decades after the event and used this term even to refer to the third generation of their grandchildren born in Greece. Hirschon states that although the majority of urban refugees became “entrenched at the bottom of the social and economical scale, they re-established their claims to cultural superiority based now on the minutiae of conduct.” See Reneé

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Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 31. 48. Fakinou, Seventh Garment, 96. 49. Ibid., 22. 50. Mana has a recurrent dream of Fotos taking revenge on his father, Demos. The dream is a clear reproduction of the pre-Olympian myth in which Kronos castrates his father, Uranus. 51. Fakinou, Seventh Garment, 45. 52. In his study of the transference of Greek baptismal names in several rural communities, Michael Herzfeld interprets the hereditary schema that frequently leads to multiple repetitions of names within the same family. However, Herzfeld explains, the identical name does not necessarily mean that the offspring is identified with the ancestors, but rather indicates the symbolic appropriation of certain desirable qualities of those ancestors. See Michael Herzfeld, “When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Baptismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity,” Journal of Anthropological Research 38.3 (Autumn 1982): 288–302. 53. Fakinou, Seventh Garment, 22. This is the same dilemma that appears in Kazantzakis’s play about the bridge sacrifice, The Master Builder. As such the question has been posed at many a historical rupture that was generally perceived as dragging Greece further away from its European origins and essence. I discuss Kazantzakis’s play The Master Builder in chapter 2. 54. Calotychos, Modern Greece, 272. 55. Galanaki, Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 165.

Chapter 4. The Yugoslav Cadavre Exquis : The Return of the Repressive 1. The documentary material in question is Lipanjska gibanja [June turmoil] (1968), which documents the protests of Belgrade University students, police beating of protesters, and Tito’s intervention to calm the situation. The footage shows Tito’s moments of lost composure before he gave the fateful speech in which he acknowledged students’ demands. His ostensible support for the students helped preserve his image in the aftermath of the events. The students protested increasing decentralization of power and its distribution among the national centers (the Yugoslav constitutive republics), as well as the increasingly evident stratification of society and the emergence of the “red bourgeoisie,” a privileged class of socialist strongmen. Students at no point questioned Tito’s authority or even Yugoslav socialism per se. Extensive analyses of the protests can be found in archival issues of the journal Praxis, also published on the event’s fortieth anniversary in Đorđe Malavrazić, ed., Šezdeset osma: Lične istorije [Sixty-eight: Personal histories] (Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 2008).



226 Notes to Pages 102–110

2. The original spelling of her name is “Jugoslava.” Since Yugoslava’s character is an obvious allegory for Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija), as much as for the “all-Yugoslav girl,” I retain the international spelling of her name throughout. 3. The Black Wave is a derogatory term for negative representations of the Yugoslav socialist reality in the art and film of the mid-1960s and early 1970s. It is most frequently used for the generation of filmmakers including Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović, Želimir Žilnik, Dušan Makavejev, Karpo Godina, and Lazar Stojanović. The Black Wave ended by 1973 in a sweeping action of political repression, allegedly in response to the Belgrade University student demonstrations of 1968, as well as the nationalist tendencies of the Croatian Spring in 1971. It is thought to have been targeted by repressive measures arguably more severely than were other forms of artistic expression that were likewise increasingly critical of socialist failures. See Bogdan Tirnanić, Crni talas [Black wave] (Beograd: Filmski centar Srbije, 2008). 4. Žilnik’s documentary Crni film [Black film] (1968), about unemployed proletarians sleeping in collective shelters and the city streets, exemplifies the thematics of the Black Wave. However, his Pioniri maleni [Little pioneers] (1967) is a shocking testimony to the tragedy of poverty-stricken children and youth abandoned by both their families and the state, out of school and largely exposed to abuse, sexual molestation, prostitution, and crime. The precocious youngsters, who candidly and off-handedly relate their criminal activity, sexual experiences, and dirty jokes to the camera, are sharply juxtaposed with the normative (and very bourgeois) ideal of Tito’s “Pioneers” from the title: model students, obedient children, and promising socialist subjects and producers. 5. Svetlana Slapšak, “Žensko telo u jugoslovenskom filmu: status žene, paradigma feminizma” [The female body in the Yugoslav film: The position of women as a feminist paradigm], in Arsić, Žene, slike, izmišljaji, 131. All subsequent translations from this text are my own. 6. The films of Živojin Pavlović and Aleksandar Petrović are arguably the most indicative of this tendency. 7. Slapšak, “Žensko telo u jugoslovenskom filmu,” 132. 8. Official aesthetics utilized a different idiom. I am grateful to Nataša Kovačević for reminding me of a whole series of epic films dealing with the World War II partisan guerilla struggle that complicate gender relations and present an example of the actual representation of official socialist policies on the issue. Despite their dichotomous representation of the war and the mythical two-dimensionality of their “enemy” characters, films like Užička republika [Guns of war] (1974), Bitka na Neretvi [The Neretva battle] (1969), and many other war spectacles treat the gender issue (among Tito’s partisans, of course) with commendable complexity. 9. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

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Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 10. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970), 29. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. Louis Althusserr, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1994), 100–140. 13. In a scene from Makavejev’s WR, the singer of the band the Fugs walks the streets of New York City brandishing an automatic rifle, while their song runs in the background: “Who will protect us from our protectors? Who shall judge our police? Who’ll redirect our directors, who’ll release our release? Who will police our judges and who will will our will? He who chooses his slavery, is he a slave still?” 14. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writing, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); see also Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley. 15. The destructive potential of this and such lumpenproletariat, exhibited during the paroxysms of the Yugoslav wars, staged an orgy of annihilation of any known values, as well as humanity itself. In that respect, the lumpen has proven itself worthy of its fearsome reputation. Yet the outcome of their destruction not only served but was ultimately intended for the reestablishment of precisely those bourgeois and markedly Oedipal values against which Bataille positioned them. 16. Recent work by Shannon Bell on the relations between the Cuban socialist state and Cuban feminism distinguishes between “social patriarchy,” or a high level of biopolitical regulation of the female body by the socialist state, and the previously existing “private patriarchy,” which administered the female body within family boundaries. Bell recognizes the persistence of “social patriarchy” even when the power of “private patriarchy” has been significantly reduced, if not exactly made obsolete. Despite undeniable achievements in the sphere of women’s social and reproductive rights, some of which are still unattainable for women in developed industrial societies, Cuban socialism still thrives on the representation of women as a militarized mother/body, exclusive emphasis on motherhood, and rare acceptance of the female gay body outside of the milieu of motherhood/adoption. See Shannon Bell, “The Political-Libidinal Economy of the Socialist Female Body: Flesh and Blood, Work and Ideas,” in Women and Revolution: Global Expressions, ed. Marie Josephine Diamond (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 339–55. Similar treatment of the rights of women is recorded in post–World War II Greece, in the period following the capitulation of leftist policies and the strong influence of the communist resistance. Janet Hart notices that the leftist promise turned the tables of traditional patriarchalism with a younger generation of men gaining prominence in the political and military struggle, thus undermining the orthodox



228 Notes to Pages 122–124

role of the father and older generations in general. Likewise, women saw themselves included in political life in modes that were not possible before. When the leftist resistance was “discredited by public authorities after the war and was no longer able to disseminate legitimate political models, the same moral standards were reversed and turned back at the newly conscious women.” See Janet Hart, New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance 1941–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 237. This may be helpful in understanding why the very progressive Yugoslav legislature never succeeded in restructuring traditional mentality: it was never really meant to. Likewise, it becomes easier to comprehend why the reversals of this legislature into a new, traditionally oriented, and restrictive one, became a top priority in virtually all Yugoslav heir states. However, while it is expected that the male nation would enthusiastically embrace the new wave of patriarchalization of society, the high level of acceptance of such antagonistic practices by large numbers of women, who themselves directly (as workers, mothers) or indirectly (as students, daughters) benefited from more liberal socialist policies, is not so easily understood. It remains one of the many “defeats” of women and feminist movements in the history of human society, regardless of historical periods or social structures in power. However, as Katherine Verdery finds, many women support their return to the household and “natural” child-bearing and caring roles, because they always felt that their home represented a shelter from the oppressive labor and social politics of the socialist state (Verdery, “From Parent-State,” 251–53). 17. For further discussion of this point see Vesna Kesić, “Gender and Ethnic Identities in Transition,” and Daša Duhaček, “Gender Perspectives on Political Identities in Yugoslavia,” both in From Gender to Nation, ed. Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov (Ravenna, Italy: Longo Editore Ravenna, 2002), 63–80, 113–30. 18. Duhaček, “Gender Perspectives on Political Identities,” 116. 19. Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov, “Introduction: From Gender to Nation,” in Iveković and Mostov, From Gender to Nation, 13. 20. Alexei Yurchak demonstrates a similar lack of awareness in his analysis of the Soviet citizens’ perceptions of the USSR prior to and following the dissolution of the country. See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 21. Tito’s impromptu speech stating that the students were “right” to protest immediately suspended the protests, the whole event ending in a big celebration. According to witness accounts, although the majority could not wait for the tension to be over, the students felt betrayed. This has led some to believe that there was no real desire for change even among the leaders of the student protests and that the whole thing was a regime-sponsored demonstration, one of many staged for foreign observers and intended as a show of liberties enjoyed in the Yugoslav brand of socialism.

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Faculty of the School of Philosophy who participated in the events and were associated with the journal Praxis and the International Summer School of Korčula have extensively written on the 1968 protests. See Nebojša Popov, ed., Sloboda i nasilje: Razgovor o časopisu Praxis i Korčulanskoj letnjoj školi (Beograd: Res publica, 2003); and Republika 424–25 (June 2008), a special issue on the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 student protests, http://www.republika.co.rs/424-425/20.html. 22. Tito used the opportunity of the 1968 student demonstrations to perform this “agricultural” action, which had been on his mind for a long time. It is not by chance that the official regime lingo frequently employed the phrase “workers, peasants, and honest intelligentsia,” to distinguish the “pillars of the socialist society” from those who were allegedly actively engaged in its subversion. 23. Robert Hayden notes that by the 1980s the population of citizens who declared themselves to be Yugoslavs in the census had reached a peak, and so had the number of mixed marriages—developments characteristic mostly of the heterogeneous urban texture (“Imagined Communities and Real Victims,” 789). 24. Pedro Ramet, ed., Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1985). 25. With the sweeping wave of new traditionalism in the 1990s, relatively progressive policies were proclaimed “remnants of communism,” while traditional patriarchal ideas, of “women’s place” in the house and society, strong antigay sentiment, and open resentment or even violence toward “difference,” came to occupy the front seat. 26. Many participants in the student protests of 1968 infer this conclusion, including Marina Abramović and Nebojša Popov. See James Westcott, When Marina Abramović Dies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); and Nebojša Popov, Iskušavanja slobode: Srbija na prelazu vekova [Temptations of freedom: Serbia at the fin-de-siècle] (Beograd: Službeni glasnik 2010). 27. Inasmuch as punk and new wave have been perceived as a protest against global masculinist revivalism following on the heels of the 1980s radical right turn in politics, the pronounced effeminate fashions and makeup styles of 1980s Yugoslav pop youth culture delineated their profound difference as much from aggressively macho Yugoslav army worship and the primitive patriarchal rhetoric and practices of the rising nationalist chauvinisms, as from widespread social conformism. 28. Slovenia managed to release itself from the Yugoslav embrace fairly painlessly and with no destruction whatsoever after the so-called ten-day war. 29. The disagreements over the future of the federation between the two major organizations of Serbian and Slovenian intellectuals became evident even before their separate but similar programs for the solution of the national question within Yugoslavia became public. The first document in question is the “Memorandum” of



230 Notes to Pages 127–129

the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, whose leak into the press in Sept. 1986 led straight to the notoriety it still holds as “the document” that allegedly contributed to the rise of other nationalisms by exposing the Serbian hegemonic conspiracy for hijacking the Yugoslav federation. The other is “Contributions for the Slovenian National Program,” written at the same time as the Serbian document but published only half a year later, when public outrage around the Serbian “Memorandum” had let down a bit. It is now clear that the entire affair was blown beyond the proportion that either document deserves, as both largely repeat mutual accusations, historical grievances, and bleak prognoses that had previously been stated many times by nationally inclined intelligentsia on both sides. A major difference between the two documents is in the solutions they propose: while the Serbian side insists on the preservation of the common state as the only acceptable outcome for the Serbian ethnicity, the Slovenians express no interest in Yugoslavia whatsoever, as their only goal is a country that would finally bear the name of the Slovenian nation. See Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 161–205. 30. According to the NSK collective, existing in a state that is “parallel,” rather than in “opposition,” to the object of criticism prevents their art from both attack and manipulation. 31. The film director Emir Kusturica performed for a brief period with one of the bands, Zabranjeno pušenje [No smoking]. 32. Some of their sketches are eerily prophetic, especially those relating to the growing nationalist hysteria in the country, like the division of Sarajevo in their sketch “The Sarajevo Wall,” which aired in the late 1980s. Sarajevo and Bosnia were effectively divided only by the Dayton Peace Agreement in Dec. 1995. 33. Žižek interprets Europe’s fascination with the Yugoslav war spectacle as witnessing the “reinvention of democracy.” See Slavoj Žižek, “Caught in Another’s Dream in Bosnia,” in Why Bosnia: Writings on the Balkan War, ed. Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz (Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1993), 200. 34. Janko Baljak’s 1995 documentary, Vidimo se u čitulji [See you in the obituary] and by Srđan Dragojević’s feature film Rane [Wounds] (1998) offer engaged commentary on the post-Yugoslav social scene. 35. Good sociological studies of this phenomenon in Serbian culture can be found in Miodrag V. Popović, Vidovdan i časni krst [Vidovdan and the holy cross] (Beograd: Krug, 2007); and Ivan Čolović, Bordel ratnika [The bordello of warriors] (Beograd: Krug, 2007). 36. While women in general were reduced to a version of the newly patriarchalized wife and mother, young girls identified with the good-looking socialite, folk singer, or the fashion model—in public an escort to the criminal/politician/tycoon.

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37. Post-Yugoslav film production of the 1990s has received extensive commentary. See, for example, the referenced works by Iordanova, Gocić, Mazaj, Bjelić, Imre, and Pavičić. 38. There exists a long tradition of European journalistic and “descriptive” presence in the Balkans, a good deal of which has been done by women. Most of them, reporting from Montenegro, Albania, or Serbia over a century ago, were received by Balkan warriors with the respect owed to a man, rather than a “skirt.” See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 160–200. 39. This generation was the last to be mobilized to still-mandatory service in the Yugoslav Army ranks at a time of dangerously growing nationalist tensions and the first to be sent to war in the constitutional and legal vacuum of 1991. While critics almost unanimously perceive a general tendency of uncritical and enthusiastic adoption of nationalist ideology at the onset of the wars, few have analyzed the huge incidence of draft dodging, desertion, and emigration abroad. Should serious studies be conducted on the topic, it would become clearer to what extent the Yugoslav “generation of the 1980s” participated in this antinationalist and antiwar trend. 40. In the years after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Yugonostalgia was criticized as the mindset of people unwilling to let go and accept the new fact of the country’s nonexistence. Several texts by Dubravka Ugrešić have been characterized as Yugonostalgic, most importantly, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain. 41. Cf. Rada Iveković, Autopsy of the Balkans.  A Psycho-Political Essay,  trans. Ilona Seidel (Graz/Vienna: Droschl, 2001). 42. Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man (New York: Vintage International, 2002), 49. 43. Ibid., 50. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Ibid., 60. 46. Ibid., 62. 47. Ibid., 132. 48. In his story “American Commando,” Hemon brilliantly links war atrocities to apparently innocent childhood games whose violence escapes both parents and social institutions. The story is found in Love and Obstacles (New York: Rivertrade Books, 2010). 49. The father who apparently counted on his immortality, as he never provided himself with an heir. This fact additionally complicated the post-Tito era, with Yugoslavia ruled by a “collective president” consisting of no fewer than eight men, each delegated by the constituency of his own republic/province. Thus the multiplicity of ethnoreligious components that were contained in Tito’s figure became fragmented



232 Notes to Pages 131–138

into its eight little (and pale) copies, none of them possessing the authority of the original. In fact, the quarreling Yugoslav brothers look like they walked off the pages of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, except that they ingested none of the father’s ability with his body. 50. Dušan Makavejev and Lazar Stojanović famously juxtapose the socialist/ communist body cult with the Nazi obsession with body health. Makavejev intersects cuts of his WR: Mysteries of the Organism with Nazi footage of mental patients in pain, receiving shockingly invasive treatments and being force-fed, which was intended to justify euthanasia of people “unfit” for the model nation. In Plastic Jesus (1971) Stojanović even more blatantly associates the two by collating the Nazis’ training of injured and crippled male youths back to combat-level ability with the display of Yugoslav Partisan units during the war. While the Nazi documentation obviously represents bodies singled out for extermination in the grandiose project of constructing a “healthy national body,” the latter examples, showing boys and men playing football or swimming, despite their amputated limbs, clearly points to their reintegration into the functioning corpus of the nation. 51. Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 187. Simultaneously, the public relationship to the symbol that used to be Tito (and for many still is, at least judging by the results of the excellent study of the phenomenon of Tito-related nostalgia described by Mitja Velikonja) in no way departs from deeply rooted patricentric tradition. Such father worship logically implies declarative sacrifice for the Big Father and what he symbolizes (Yugoslavia, the socialist revolution, incessant progress and construction, his legacy, etc.), manifested in many performative ways (through grandiose celebrations of his “birthday,” performances given on occasion of visits by foreign heads of state), or even more literally (in voluntary working brigades participating in road or railway construction, reforestation, and similar projects). Meanwhile, the cult that arose around Tito himself has all the characteristics of the American Dream, according to Velikonja, albeit transposed into a more politicized reality than is a mere money-as-power ideal of capitalism. Beginning with the epic battles of World War II, the cult curiously persists to this day and attracts a following of youth born years after his death. Tito is still remembered as a poor undereducated peasant boy, who through his own perseverance, will, and capability, through prisons, revolution, and hard work, rose to the ranks of the world elite to become “a hedonist, bon vivant, womanizer, and a true macho.” See Mitja Velikonja, Titostalgija, trans. Branka Dimitrijević (Beograd: Čigoja štampa, 2010), 123. 52. Hemon, Nowhere Man, 94. 53. With Hemon’s characteristic humor, Jozef refuses to kill the mouse with a copy of The Idiot and settles for Death in Venice. The intruder is thus murdered by the hosts’ overwhelming “cultural” response.

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54. Milošević’s speech on the six hundredth anniversary of the 1389 Kosovo battle, marking the conquest of medieval Serbia by the Ottoman Empire, is seen as the crucial event in the rise of Serbian nationalism. 55. In Yugoslav political terms: the time of the post–Croatian Spring purges, a new wave of the persecution of political enemies, and the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia. 56. Miljenko Jergović, Srda pjeva u ponoć na Duhove [Srda is singing on All Saints Night] (Beograd: Rende, 2009), 452. 57. Ibid., 374. 58. Many anxious glances at the time were directed at Bosnia and Sarajevo, which seemed to be immune to the spreading of the nationalist infection, thanks to their specific mixture of cultures and religions. This multicultural environment was precisely the reason why Bosnia and Sarajevo also became the epitome of the Yugoslav tragedy. 59. Jergović, Srda, 377. 60. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 18. 61. Ibid., 8. 62. Ibid. 63. A good deal of his writing presents an unofficial history of Yugoslavia, its roots, the idea of pan-South Slavism, and its dissolution, which he achieves through engaging narration, full of digressions and seemingly unimportant details. This is most prominent in the novels Dvori od oraha [Walnut castle] (2003) and Srda pjeva u ponoć na Duhove, as well as in his essayist prose, especially Historijska čitanka [The history reader] (2004). His latest project of this kind is the documentary film coauthored with the Serbian writer Marko Vidojković, Dugo putovanje kroz istoriju, historiju i povijest [The long road through Balkan history] (2010), which follows the trail of massacres committed during and after World War II and the political purposes for which they were used by the historiography of Tito’s Yugoslavia, as well as by post-Yugoslav historical revisionism. 64. Slavoj Žižek, “The Dreams of Others,” These Times, May 18, 2007. 65. This episode bears an uncanny resemblance to the shocking images that circulated the world in the summer of 2009, of two Romanian Gypsy girls’ drowned bodies lying on an Italian beach in full view of bathers and sun worshippers, who continued their usual activities, ignoring the two corpses among them. 66. Žižek, “Caught in Another’s Dream,” 233. 67. Ibid., 233–34. This is precisely the sentiment promoted by Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), which I analyze in greater detail in Tatjana Aleksić, “National Definition through Postmodern Fragmentation: Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars,” Slavic and East European Journal 53.1 (Spring 2009): 85–103.



234 Notes to Pages 141–145

68. See Boris Buden, Kaptolski kolodvor: politički eseji [Central Railway Station: Political essays] (Beograd: Centar za savremenu umetnost, 2002), 140–48. 69. An identical argument is present in some of the Serbian prose that designates “peasant fanatics” as the main culprit for Yugoslav post–World War II socialist/communist orientation, as well as the ugliness of most of the Yugoslav cities. As after the war large numbers of villagers moved into the devastated postwar urban environments (predominantly Belgrade), they allegedly further destroyed the little urban sophistication, cleanliness, and beauty that still remained. They are the first unwanted immigrants who made Serbian cities uninhabitable, with urban dwellers necessarily withdrawing into obscurity and anonymity. Slobodan Selenić and Borisav Pekić are among more famous authors who exploited this dichotomy between fanatical, uneducated, yet healthy villagers and the dying bourgeois class, highly cultured yet ailing and powerless against the new invasion. Cf. Slobodan Selenić, Fathers and Forefathers, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (New York: Random House, 2011), published as Očevi i oci (Beograd: Prosveta, 1985); Selenić, Premeditated Murder, trans. Jelena Petrović (New York: Harvill Secker, 1997), published as Ubistvo s predumišljajem (Beograd: Prosveta, 1993); and Borisav Pekić, The Houses of Belgrade, trans. Bernard Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), published as Hodočašće Arsenija Njegovana (Beograd: BIGZ, 1984). 70. The umbrella is a nod to Jergović’s literary influences. Perhaps the most celebrated umbrella exists in Borislav Pekić’s Kako upokojiti vampira [How to quiet a vampire] (1977), in which it is the symbol of the mysterious past that haunts the former Nazi troop commander Rutkowski upon his return to the Croatian city where he was posted during the war. The umbrella is a phallic symbol of power that emerges from his struggle with the past, as well as the murder weapon by which Rutkowski dies. Pekić ends his novel by having the umbrella “chained” to the narrator’s staircase; the turbulent past rests for the time being after it has inflicted its revenge. Jergović’s umbrella is at large, the body is suspended, and society continues its existence in perpetual state of unrest. 71. Liv Nilsson Stutz, “More than Metaphor: Approaching the Human Cadaver in Archaeology,” in The Materiality of Death: Bodies, Burials, Beliefs, ed. Fredrik Fahlander and Terje Oestigard (Oxford: BAR International Series 1768, 2008), 19. 72. Ibid., 23. 73. Cf. A. B. Yehoshua’s Woman in Jerusalem, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Harcourt, 2004). A Ukrainian engineer doing menial work in Jerusalem dies in a bombing attack in the street and lies unclaimed for months in the morgue. When the newspapers create a scandal, her former employer undertakes an investigation to clear his name, and her remains are transferred back to Ukraine. However, the company’s human resources manager decides to return her coffin to Jerusalem and

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bring her old mother and son to Israel with him. Unlike Jergović’s Srda Kapurova, the Ukrainian woman made the city of Jerusalem her own; her corpse claims a right to it and opens a way for her descendants to claim it as theirs, too. 74. Mitläufer (fellow travelers) is the euphemism widely used for Germans unwilling to deal with the fact of their support for Nazism. The term came to signify the allegedly “hypnotized” and “victimized” masses who simply “followed along,” allegedly unaware of the policies of extermination conducted during the war. 75. This is how Marguerite Duras sees the replacement of one political event by another: a hasty turnover of events that leaves no space for reflection about the next step. Instead, she states that the previous order must be undone before the next order is made. The corpse is just such a symbol of undoing that simultaneously leaves space open for the next event. See Karen Piper, “The Signifying Corpse: Re-reading Kristeva on Marguerite Duras,” in The Kristeva Critical Reader, ed. John Lechte and Mary Zournazi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 107. 76. Quoted in Žarkov, Body of War, 136.

Chapter 5. Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History 1. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148. 2. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999), 414. 3. Julia Kristeva posits “enunciation” as the main stage in the process of subjectivization (Revolution in Poetic Language). 4. Jehanne Gheith, “I Never Talked: Enforced Silence, Non-Narrative Memory and the Gulag,” Mortality 12.2 (2007): 161. 5. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 69. 6. In the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars the idea of coming to terms with both collective and individual responsibility for the tragedy does not sit well with nationalist elites and the silent and observing majorities on any of the responsible sides. Instead, both Serbian and Croatian “public opinion” on the matter, to mention just the major players, exhibits textbook symptoms of the repressed sense of responsibility, the “neurotic relation to the past,” as described by Adorno in post–World War II Germany. Without likening Nazism and its effects to the crimes committed in the Yugoslav dissolution wars—which would be a distasteful relativization— Adorno’s definition of the absence of national consensus about responsibility for past events nevertheless accurately describes the current state of public opinion about the wars in the new nation-states: “defensive postures where one is not attacked, intense affects where they are hardly warranted by the situation, an absence of affect in the face of the gravest matters, not seldom simply a repression of what is



236 Notes to Pages 148–155

known or half-known.” See Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 89–103. The victims, again according to Adorno’s observation, are “cheated” out of the only thing left to them— remembrance. 7. Abramović treats her personal life with equal sincerity, with which she exposes her body to the audiences. More information can be found in her latest authorized biography: Westcott, When Marina Abramović Dies. 8. My reference here is to Abramović’s physical existence, not her political engagement. Throughout her long career, Marina Abramović has harmed her body to the extent that on several occasions she seriously endangered her life. She has not been politically persecuted. 9. The term corporeal memory is used by Siegrid Weigel in her study of Benjamin in Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Lyn Marven utilizes the term Körper-Sprache, which she defines as “languages of gesture and of the body,” which surpass language and act as the “ultimate referent for language.” See Lyn Marven, Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 29. 10. Tsing can be read as the other half of Albahari’s “parental diptych” and is dedicated to the father. After the father’s death the narrator leaves on a long trip around the United States, where he finds consolation in its vast spaces and small towns, while megapolises like New York make him feel alone and depressed. It is interesting that each of the two deaths is followed by the narrator’s escape into the New World. The mother’s, however, symbolizes the total loss of ground and identity, and the escape is permanent. Each of the two books, likewise, deals with his inability to convey the memory of his departed parents into a written text. Tsing is a monologic exercise, although there is an imaginary episodic female interlocutor. Bait is to a large extent dialogic, as most of the narrator’s soliloquies are, in fact, conversations with the mother or his Canadian alter ego/fantasy, Donald. 11. David Albahari, Tsing, trans. David Albahari (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 40. The father’s death brings a release from the indebtedness to the parents for the gift of life, the obligation to gratitude that creates tension within the family, as well as the very ambivalent dynamics of filial duty and hatred between the son and father. 12. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 16. 13. This connection is clearer in the original title, since the Serbian word for “bait” is mamac and already contains the word mama (mother). 14. David Albahari, Bait, trans. Peter Agnone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 106. 15. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. Despite the fact that some of the literary

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examples with which she illustrates the point of our irresolvable “strangeness” to ourselves are non-Western, they mostly serve the purpose of defining her politics on immigration to the West, specifically France. 16. All of her performances that contain a strong ideological dimension are also based on the personal and familial, whether parts of her ancestral history or the recurring presence of various images of her parents, especially the mother. It is interesting that in her arguably most compelling performances Abramović places images of her parents in the background of the space she occupies with her performance. She thus establishes a double bind of authoritativeness in the same protagonists: family and ideology (her parents in their private role as her parents/guardians and in their role as Yugoslav guerilla fighters and postwar national heroes invested in communist/socialist power structures). 17. Rhythm 5 was performed in Belgrade in 1974; Lips of Thomas was first performed in 1975 in Austria and reperformed in New York in 2005. 18. Lips of Thomas was first performed at Galerie Krinzinger, Innsbruck, in 1975. Abramović was carried away by audience members who realized that she was on the point of losing consciousness. She reperformed it in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2005. 19. See http://www.mocp.org/detail.php?t=objects&type=browse&f=maker&s =Abramovi%C4%87%2C+Marina&record=0. 20. The symbolism of the five-pointed star figures prominently both in Abramović’s performances and in her life. She even purchased a house shaped like a fivepointed star in New York to further emphasize the point on which she has always insisted, that the Yugoslav brand of communism, as she calls it, has thoroughly determined and coded her entire existence. 21. In the 2005 reperformance of this act Abramović added other objects that convey purely personal meaning, yet even this “autobiographized” subject of the performance is first and foremost an ideologically shaped individual who only after being subjectivated in the social sphere is able to beget her personal story. She explains the performance in this audio file via the Museum of Modern Art’s multimedia collection, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/190.html (accessed Feb. 2013). 22. Elias Maglinis, The Interrogation, trans. Patricia Barbeito (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2013), 22. 23. Renata Salecl, “Cut in the Body: From Clitoridectomy to Body Art,” in Thinking through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Staceys (New York: Routledge, 2001), 27–28. 24. Caroline Bynum offers a medievalist’s perspective, where self-mutilation can be a means of rapprochement between the individual body and the sanctity of the body that represents the desired authority. Medieval history records many instances



238 Notes to Pages 161–165

of body manipulation and willing mutilation for religious goals, most of them performed by women. This immediately invokes the associations of women’s awareness of the “impurity” of their bodies and their desire to elevate them to the level of sanctity by interrupting their basic “shameful” functions, yet this very desire is no less also a result of cultural compulsion. Namely, as Caroline Bynum states, “the various cultures in which women are more inclined than men to fast, to mutilate themselves, to experience the gift of tongues and to somatize spiritual states are all societies that associate the female with self-sacrifice and service.” See Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 1: 175. 25. Several Yugoslav conceptual artists, some of whose work was contemporaneous with Abramović’s, likewise brought to the fore the problem of the dysfunctional socialist state and the nationalist madness in the wake of the latest wars. Although it is impossible not to do injustice to many worthy performances, I will mention only several that contain the sacrificial aspect as well as criticism of the regime. Jože SlakĐoka performed the act entitled This Is My Blood You Shed in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1979, in which he slashed his wrists and let the blood drip onto a bedsheet until it was completely soaked in blood. In Raša Teodosijević’s Drinking Water (Belgrade, 1974), the artist, naked and prostrate, drinks glasses of water, trying to match the breathing pattern of the fish out of water he threw before the audience; too much water makes him vomit onto a sheet containing color contrast, which turns red when it comes in contact with fluid; the performance ends when the sheet is completely dyed red. The performances of Jusuf Hadžifejzović are famously shocking and surreal, but the one he performed at the Cetinje Biennale in the wake of the war in 1991 is unmatched: in From Kitsch to Blood Is Only One Step, the artist shaves his head, mixes the hair with mud, drinks it, and spreads it all over his head and body; he replaces female bras hanging on the wall with knives; unpredictably but effectively the power is cut by a raging storm outside and interrupts the performance. See Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, Moderna galerija Ljubljana/Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 43 (exhibition catalog). Some of the conceptual artists active during the Yugoslav decades equally poignantly reflected on the dissolution wars of the 1990s (e.g., Abramović with Balkan Baroque, 1997; Jusuf Hadžifejzović with Fear of Drinking Water, 1994). For details about Hadžifejzović’s performance, see http://www.csupomona.edu/~kellogg_gallery/critics/hadzifejzovic .html (accessed Oct. 2010). 26. Dubravka Ugrešić employs a similar gesture in her Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996). The mother of the narrator in that novel is very old and fragile, and the narrator attempts to capture various stages of her bodily disintegration in photographic images, usually taken during the mother’s increasingly frequent hospital stays and operations.

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27. Maglinis, Interrogation, 52–55. 28. Ibid., 39. 29. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16. 30. Maglinnis, Interrogation, 48–50. 31. Perhaps one of the most shameful facts of the Greek post-junta trials was that the court did not allow the evidence of sexual violation in prisons to be discussed at all. The victims were barred from telling of their ordeals not only by the shameful nature of the act committed on their bodies but also by the system itself, which refused to add this ignominy to the already long list of abuses. 32. Maglinis, Interrogation, 64. 33. Mostov, “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body,” 96. 34. Homosexuality has historically been treated according to the active/passive binary, the relationship in which the sexual position becomes synonymous with the actor’s social role, although many theorists have sought to complicate this inversion relation and define a position of masculinity within homosexuality. See David M. Halperin et al., eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Writing on Greek masculinity (and perceptions of homosexuality) in rural Cyprus, Peter Loizos finds that his informants insisted that only the passive partner in the homosexual act is stigmatized. The active partner, on the contrary, is merely proving his manliness by doing what men normally do, “fuck”: “this is a masculine and a dominant thing to do, and whomsoever and whatever is so used is subordinated and therefore inferior party.” See Peter Loizos, “A Broken Mirror: Masculine Sexuality in Greek Ethnography,” in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 71. 35. Žarkov, Body of War, 165. Žarkov analyzes how the Croatian press reported on the sexual violation of males in the camps held by Serbs, insisting on sexualized objectivization of both Muslim men, who were feminized and homosexualized as victims, and Serbian men, who were homosexualized and demonized as perpetrators. In this way the media established the site of the pure national body for the Croatian men who allegedly did not participate in sexual violations, despite contrary evidence of similar crimes taking place in concentration camps held by Croatian forces. Of identical nature is the obscene representation of Iraqi detainees’ naked bodies in the American media in the wake of the discovery of the Abu-Ghraib prison torture. The notion of the intact masculinity of the American soldier/national body is constructed through the same mechanism, since the prisoners were always depicted as performing mock sexual acts on each other, with American soldiers observing and



240 Notes to Pages 166–169

recording them. They themselves did not partake in the “homosexual” act; thus their masculinity remains unquestioned. 36. Scarry, Body in Pain, 27–31. 37. Caroline Williams, “Ideology and Imaginary: Returning to Althusser,” in Ideology after Poststructuralism, ed. Siniša Malešević and Iain MacKenzie (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 37. 38. The territories of the dissolved first Yugoslavia were in an almost identical chaotic state at the time, with multiple foreign invaders opportunistically claiming various parts of its territory, as well as fighting between procommunist guerilla and domestic profascist units. World War II in the Yugoslav territories, however, had an added ethnoreligious dimension that was not present in the fairly monolithic culture of Greece and that Tito’s victorious multiethnic option simplified in the postwar years into the narrative of the struggle against “foreign invaders” and their “domestic collaborators.” In the wake of Tito’s death, this ethnoreligious conflict resumed at the point at which it was discontinued in 1944. 39. Polymeris Voglis, Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 4. 40. Mika Haritos-Fatouros, The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized Torture (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 202. 41. Ibid., 211 n11. Maglinis in his book also quotes parts of this song. 42. Maglinis, Interrogation, 44–45. 43. More on “white terror” and the concentration camps on deserted islands of Makronisos, Yioura, as well as other torture facilities, can be found in Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens; Yannis Hamilakis, Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Lefteris Raftopoulos, To mikos tis nihtas: Makronisos: ’48–50. ChronikoMartiria [Long nights: Makronisos: 248–50. Chronicles-Testimonies] (Athens: Kastaniotis, 1997); and Eleni Fourtouni, Greek Women in Resistance: Journals-Oral Histories (New Haven: Thelpini Press, 1986). The reference to cats in the quotation originates in one of the favorite torture methods on the island of Makronisos, in which the prisoner would be put in a bag with cats and thrown into the sea—either he would drown the cats, or he would drown himself. 44. I am using the term post–World War II for a lack of a better one, since these camps marked the existence of communist regimes but also of right-wing military dictatorships in Greece and all over Latin America, before once again reemerging in the course of Yugoslav dissolution wars. 45. See Gheith, “I Never Talked,” which discusses this fact in relation to the Holocaust, noting the different treatment that the survivors of Nazi camps received, both in history and in society. The deviousness of communist and military junta

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camps is based on two premises: most of the post–World War II camps also operated as punitive institutions for criminals despite the fact that the majority of the prisoners were political; political prisoners were branded as “enemies of the state.” Both these facts stigmatized prisoners upon return to society, and not only did they have problems finding decent employment and reintegrating, but they were frequently shunned by their families or friends, who were themselves endangered if associating with former convicts. Upon release from the camp, prisoners were explicitly prohibited from talking about their experience; thus the camp was perhaps the best-kept public “secret” that everybody knew about but nobody could discuss. All this created a wall of silence about camps and practices of torture and humiliation, so that most survivors never spoke openly, perhaps even fearing that should the volatile political situation reverse, they could again be subject to persecution and imprisonment. 46. The right-wing state emphasized collective familial “responsibility” for the political beliefs of its members and incarcerated entire families, including teenage children. Those who escaped imprisonment were forever tortured by guilt for the suffering of their family; those who signed the “repentance” were guilty both of involving the family in the first place and then of betraying their own beliefs. See Thassoula Vervenioti, “Left-Wing Women between Politics and Family,” in After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and the State in Greece 1943–1960, ed. Mark Mazower (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 105–21. 47. Hamilakis, Nation and Its Ruins, 205–42. 48. Yet another form of literature that brings shivers down the spine is Danilo Kiš’s universal encyclopedia of crime—A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—one of the most powerful and truthful testimonies of the ultimate human evil perpetuated in Stalinist communism. Moreover, this is a testimony of events that Kiš, at the time he wrote the collection, believed could not have happened in his country. He only learned the truth ten years later, in 1986, from several of the Goli Otok female survivors he met in Israel, a discovery that prompted him to make his final addition to his oeuvre, the documentary Bare Life, dir. Aleksandar Mandić (Goli život, 1989). 49. Only when in 1968 a survivor of Goli Otok, Dragoslav Mihailović, published what became a cult novel, Kad su cvetale tikve [When pumpkins blossomed] (1968), did Goli Otok emerge as a topic of interest, not only in literature but also in the sphere of journalism and public discourse. The truth about the Gulag appeared in Yugoslavia at about the same time, with the publication of a memoir by a Yugoslav prisoner of Stalinism, Karlo Štajner, 7000 dana u Sibiru [7,000 days in Siberia] (1971), as well as through translations of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, long before they became known in the USSR. It was thanks to this kind of literature that communist prison camps and Goli Otok especially became the focus of public and media attention, with more testimonies emerging from the survivors. Besides Mihailović’s novel, other influential



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books on the subject were the memoir of Miroslav Popović, Udri bandu [Smother the traitor] (1984); and Ljubičica bela: vic dug dve i po godine [Wood lily flower: A twoand-a-half-year-long joke] (1990), by a female survivor of Goli Otok, Ženi Lebl. Emir Kusturica’s 1985 film Otac na službenom putu [When father was away on business] brilliantly deals with the subject of political persecution of the period. What was still entirely missing to complete the knowledge of the period, however, was any kind of prose document by the “other side.” Eventually, such a book appeared only in 2010, as a series of controversial interviews with the last living witness personally responsible for the existence of Goli Otok and the chief of the Yugoslav secret police of the time: Jovo Kapičić, see Tamara Nikčević, Goli Otoci Jova Kapičića [Prison camps of Jovo Kapičić] (Beograd: VBZ, 2010). 50. Quoted in Mileta Prodanović’s presentation “From a Political to an Artistic Camp: Goli Otok and Contemporary Fine Arts,” given at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Convention, Philadelphia, Dec. 2008. 51. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 52. Rhythm 0 was enacted for the first and only time in Italy in 1974. 53. I discuss this in chapter 1. 54. Nancy and Blanchot see community as less of a defensive than a compassionate collective whose role is to help a dying individual face death and not get lost in death’s horror. 55. Maglinis, Interrogation, 75. 56. Ibid., 71. 57. Ibid., 78. 58. This contradictory function of language finds its articulation in the writing of Maurice Blanchot, who ascribes to language the ability to simultaneously create and annihilate both the speaking subject and the object of speech. “I” as the speaking subject, Blanchot says, “deny the existence of what I am saying, but I also deny the existence of the person who is saying it.” See Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1981), 43. 59. Albahari, Bait, 6. 60. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 117. 61. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 139. 62. Ibid. 63. Panourgia, Dangerous Citizens, 150–55. 64. Perhaps the best-known literary example of this strategy is found in his fictional character Austerlitz, whose affinity with the history taught in English textbooks reveals a strange silence regarding the most recent events of World War II. His own repressed memory of the child transport in which he was sent to the safety

Notes to Pages 174–180

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of England reemerges in his contact with architectural remnants of the event that entirely determined his life. Thus his destiny serves as a metaphor for the “conspiracy of silence” about the Holocaust of which Sebald accuses the German nation. 65. Two recent documentaries on the subject deserve attention. Dugo putovanje kroz istoriju, historiju i povijest [The long road through Balkan history], dir. Željko Mitrović (2010), documents the road trip of two prominent contemporary writers, one Serbian and the other Bosnian-Croatian, who visit the key sites of Yugoslav constitutional memory but also new monuments erected to some of the victims of partisan postwar massacres. The intention behind Cinema Komunisto, dir Mila Turajlić (2010), was to present Yugoslavia as a fictional filmic narrative written by Tito and his cohort but also by the film workers themselves; in this narrative there was only space for the victorious partisan struggle and the unity and brotherhood of Yugoslav peoples. 66. In the 1980s the exhumation of wartime collective burial sites became a frequent and public macabre spectacle in which different ethnic groups finally put to rest the bodies of their dead murdered by domestic Nazi collaborators. An even more interesting phenomenon took place all over the former country during the first decade of the 2000s, which witnessed a massive and equally uncritical rehabilitation of those who were once executed as collaborators and a proliferation of memorials commemorating victims executed by “communists.” The “communists” became an alien species, incompatible with the national being of those who were executed and of those who memorialize them. In the current historical moment, therefore, the “communists” are not Croats, Serbs, or Macedonians, just as the “domestic traitors,” which was the common definition of pro-Nazi collaborators in history books and memorials created by communist historiography, had neither names nor ethnic affiliation. This is yet another instance of orchestrated silence that was once imposed for the sake of peaceful cohabitation and the “brotherhood and unity” of Yugoslav ethnoreligious groups. While in multiethnic Yugoslavia the ethnicity of alleged collaborators had to be occluded for the sake of peace, in post-Yugoslav historiography the perpetrators are the collective body of the “other” ethnicity or religious group. “Communists,” on the other hand, belong to the past, from which each of these national bodies is very eager to dissociate itself. 67. Boris Buden, Barikade (Zagreb: Arkzin, 1996), 143–47. 68. Albahari, Bait, 59. 69. Ibid., 86. 70. Miljenko Jergović, Otac [Father] (Beograd: Rende, 2010), 155 (my translation). 71. Albahari, Bait, 113. 72. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Benjamin inscribes Klee’s lost painting, Angelus Novus, with the meaning of the Angel of History observing the “storm” of history with his back turned



244 Notes to Pages 180–183

to the future (257). What humans perceive as a continuous succession of ever-new events, replacing one another over a long period of time, appears from the Angel’s perspective to be a “single catastrophe” of history. It is only the limited perspective of human existence that makes this catastrophe look like a long process unstoppably running its course toward a resolution in the future. The Angel cannot accomplish the task of repairing the damage that history has inflicted on humanity, to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” He is incapable of “redeeming” history for humanity, and that task, in Benjamin’s account, falls to humanity itself, whose each new generation is “endowed with a weak Messianic power” (254–57).

Conclusion: Community, Communalism, Communism 1. Reminding the populace, as the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy found necessary, of the lucky failure of the “destructiveness” of May ’68, which threatened to topple social order as we know it. 2. The initially much-hailed “Arab Spring” is itself plagued by the absence of structure or well-defined goals and has in its aftermath uncovered thinly veiled deep religious or class divisions and intolerance. Save for the removal of dictatorship, these popular movements have had neither a strategy nor an idea of which direction to take after the dictator was gone. 3. Not the ideal of community one would like to inhabit, but instead the type of communal organization one can enjoy on condition of giving up freedom and subjecting oneself to phobias and repression—to the “stuffy air” within a closed space, in Bauman’s rendition. See Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (London: Polity Press 2001). 4. Jurgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 93–94. 5. Many have extolled the power of virtual social networking in organizing the protests, particularly in Egypt, without considering that it is precisely the anonymity of such organizing that is the main cause of these movements’ general failure to achieve long-term goals. 6. Marcuse’s well-known definition of a technocratic society emphasizes this conformist dimension of the individual who, out of necessity or personal comfort, opts for willing slavery to unnecessary labor and an aggressive society perpetuating itself on war and fear. In order to liberate himself, the modern individual would have to repel all desire save that for the satisfaction of her basic, “true” needs (for food and shelter), because as long as she feels vulnerable to “false” needs, she exposes herself to domination. The desire of the elite is promoted and endorsed as that of every individual, and the individual succumbs to the pressure of labor and ownership, which only further perpetuates the status quo. True liberation would entail the impossible

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task of the creation of new institutions and a new individual free of want and desire. See Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 7. It is still early to predict what will come of the “Arab unrest,” the currently ongoing conflicts against autocratic Middle Eastern regimes and widespread poverty. Should these revolutions turn out to be little more than leading toward the strengthening of religious rule in formerly prosecular regimes, or merely sectarian struggles in societies with already strong Islamic laws, the result would be the exact opposite of individual and collective liberation. 8. Michel Foucault, preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii. 9. Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation (New York: Verso, 1996), 205. 10. As I mention in the introduction, feminine is the concept I borrowed from Kristeva’s definition of marginality, later developed by Sue Vice, that includes other bodies besides female ones but that is characterized by properties usually associated with those of femininity. Bataille discusses the sacred in Visions of Excess, esp. “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” 137–60. His idea of the homogenous/sacred comprises both “waste” and elements of “superior transcendent value.” Thus, his definition of the sacred includes filth, waste, poor social classes, but also the sovereign, or, as the ultimate example, the fascist leader. 11. These are still limited to a few annual events, most prominently the annual Zagreb Subversive Film Festival and New York Left Forum, both increasingly turning into venues for social problematics in general. It is questionable, however, what novel arguments about the communist idea could be offered by the mostly Western leftist intellectuals occupying prominent positions at leading academic institutions to the interested audiences who have inherited the frequently uncritically dismissive disappointment with the idea itself. 12. See Beth Hinderliter, et al. eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2009). 13. Although there are many similar initiatives in the cultural sphere, I will just briefly mention the artists and intellectuals gathered around Grupa spomenik (The Monument Group) and their “forensic” approach to poetry and artwork that requires a painful reliving and reenactments of trauma as a precondition for the creation of a dialogic space that could become a new and very possible community



246 Notes to Pages 189–197

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Turajlić, Mila. Cinema komunisto. Beograd: 3K Productions, 2010. Tziovas, Dimitris. “‘Moscóv-Selim’ and The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Narratives of Identity and the Semiotic Chora.” In Tziovas, Other Self, 249–71. ———, ed. The Other Self: Selfhood and Society in Modern Greek Fiction. New York and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003. Ugrešić, Dubravka. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New York: New Directions, 1999. Published as Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (Beograd: Samizdat B92, 2002). Velikonja, Mitja. Titostalgija. Trans. Branka Dimitrijević. Beograd: Čigoja štampa, 2010. Verdery, Katherine. “From Parent State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” East European Politics and Societies 8 (1994): 225–55. ———. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Vervenioti, Tassoula. “Left-Wing Women between Politics and Family.” In After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and the State in Greece, 1943–1960, ed. Mark Mazower, 105–21. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Vice, Sue. “Bakhtin and Kristeva: Grotesque Body, Abject Self.” In Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, ed. Carol Adlam et al., 160–74. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Voglis, Polymeris. Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Vucinich, Wayne S., ed. Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands. Berkeley: International Area Studies, 1995. Vučković, Radovan. Velika sinteza o Ivi Andriću [The grand synthesis about Ivo Andrić]. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1974. Wachtel, Andrew. “The Archeology of Andrić’s Narrative.” In Vucinich, Ivo Andrić Revisited, 82–102. Walsh, Lisa. “Writing into the Symbolic: The Maternal Metaphor in Hélène Cixous.” In Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy, and Language, ed. Christina Hendricks and Kelly Oliver, 347–66. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 2 vols. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968 Weigel, Sigrid. Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Westcott, James. When Marina Abramović Dies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. White, Hayden. “The Burden of History.” History and Theory 5.2 (1996): 111–34.

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Index

Abramović, Marina: The Lips of Thomas, 162–65, 238n18; performing body and ideology, 19, 156, 160, 194, 238n16, 238nn20–21; Rhythm 5, 161–63; Rhythm 0, 175–77 Agamben, Giorgio, 37–38, 41; homo sacer, 133. See also Bataille, Georges: the sacred Albahari, David: Bait, 154–67, 179–81, 237n13; Tsing, 237nn10–11 Albania: and communism, 64, 74–76; Enver Hoxha and, 68, 222n77, 222nn79–80; and Europe, 222n78; in Kadare’s work, 56–57, 64, 68, 77 Althusser, Louis, 38, 122 Andrić, Ivo, 17, 47, 189, 214n5; The Bridge on the Drina, 55–64, 71, 73–78, 217n28, 218n32 Arsić, Branka: The Building of Skadar, 30–31 Augustinos, Olga, 47, 214n4 Balkans, the: Balkanism, 129–31; colonialism in, 54–57, 64–65, 69–70, 106–7; communalism in, 194–96; communities of, 10–14, 17, 60–61; as metaphor, 47–49, 73 Balkan legend of immurement, the, 16–17, 35, 124, 214n4, 217n28; The Bridge of Arta, 1–4, 61, 199n1; The Building of Skadar, 1–3, 30, 46, 199n4, 202n20; compared to Gothic literature, 202n19; and Goethe, 46; and homosociality, 30–31; in literature, 46–78; psychoanalytical reading of, 24–26. See also Dundes, Alan; Eliade, Mircea; Calvino, Italo Bataille, Georges: capitalism and excess, 44–45, 123, 228n15; the sacred, 41–42, 192, 246n10; sacrifice, 40–41, 213n65 Bauman, Zygmunt: really existing

community, 187, 245n3; state violence, 202n28 Bien, Peter, 50, 72 Benjamin, Walter, 183, 237n9, 244n72 Bjelić, Dušan, 31–32 Black Wave, the: and gender relations, 114– 15, 119–20, 131; and ideology, 18, 113, 123, 133–34, 227nn3–4 body: female, 5, 17, 23, 28–30, 32, 190–91, 209n38, 217n19; and history 152, 172; male 34–36, 55, 210n45, 211n46; reproductive, 25–27, 206n13, 207n19, 211n49; for sacrifice, 8, 14, 37–38, 40, 42, 184, 189, 192. See also cadaver; corpse; Marina Abramović: performing body and ideology; freedom: body and Borneman, John, 210n41, 211n46 Bosnia: in Andrić, 56, 60–63, 70–73, 76; on film, 132; in Hemon, 137; in Jergović, 141–42 bridge: “bridge novels,” 17, 47–78, 214n4, 215n7; as metaphor, 18, 25, 52, 74, 202n19. See also Balkan legend of immurement; Balkans: as metaphor Bronfen, Elisabeth: Over Her Dead Body, 28–29, 208n27 brotherhood, and unity, 124, 126, 136, 138, 142, 244n66 Buden, Boris, 181 Butler, Judith: gender melancholy, 90, 92–93; interpellation, 86–87, 224n30 cadaver, 19, 133, 147 Calotychos, Evangelos, 215n7, 224n33 Calvino, Italo, 5–6, 32–33 Cixous, Hélène, 22, 205n7 community, 3, 5, 6–11, 17–20; and capitalism, 14–15, 42–45; in crisis, 6–7, 14–15, 38, 79, 196, 200n10;

263

community (cont.): and communalism, 12–13, 15, 18, 20, 188, 194–5, 204n31; and communism, 13, 26, 195, 230n25; and society, 11–12, 80, 203n26–27. See also sacrifice; Yugoslavia corpse, 8, 29, 133, 139, 149, 201n15, 208n27, 236n75; as allegory, 110–12, 139–50 Croatia: in Albahari, 157–58; Croatian Spring, 126, 227n3; in Jergović, 140–48 Delaney, Carol, 54, 216nn17–18 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, on desire and unfreedom, 121–22 Derrida, Jacques, on sacrifice, 87, 91–92 desire: and capitalism, 15, 42, 213n67, 245n6; and conflict, 4–6, 40–41, 53–54, 189–90, 212n61; creative, 32–33; and freedom, 19, 39–40, 121–22; homosocial, 31–32, 209n34, 209n38; sexual, 34, 201n41 dissent, 7, 9, 11, 14, 86, 129, 173 Doulis, Thomas, 101, 225n47 Drakulić, Slavenka, 30, 144, 191 Dragojević, Srdjan, 132 Dundes, Alan, 24–25, 202n19 Eliade, Mircea, 9, 214n3 Esposito, Roberto, on community and sacrifice, 40 Euripides, 174, 215n11 EU, the, 13, 31, 32, 65, 192, 195–96, 219n36 Fakinou, Eugenia, 19; The Seventh Garment, 80–84, 95–106 Fakinos, Aris: The Dream of Master Builder Nikitas, 47, 55, 57, 68–69, 77–78 Felman, Shoshana, on trauma and silence, 179 father’s law, 82, 85, 160 feminine, the: as marginality, 17, 29, 37–38, 40, 205n37, 246n10; principle, 18, 24, 96, 112, 131, 191–92 freedom: body and, 164–65, 184; individual, 11, 19, 33; obstacles to, 39–40, 193–94; unfreedom, 39, 121–23, 187 foreigner, the, 35, 89–90, 159–60, 202n18 Foucault, Michel: body in history, 152, 191;



264

Index

body and power, 11, 38–39, 45, 175, 191; mass sacrifice, 44, 204n29. See also Mbembe, Achille: necropolitics Freud, Sigmund: dead father, 86; parricide, 21–22; social compulsion, 89–90; sexual repression, 122 Galanaki, Rhea, 19; The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, 80–95, 106–8 Girard, Rene: and sacrifice 2, 21–22, 143; the sacred, 190, 199n1, 202n1840 Goli Otok, 174, 242nn48–49 Gourgouris, Stathis, 50 Greece: and the Balkans, 12, 27; catastrophe, 80, 83, 101, 223n4, 225n47; and Europe, 53, 187, 173, 195; in Fakinou, 96–106; in Fakinos, 68–69, 77; Golden Dawn, 13, 196; in Kazantzakis, 68–69, 83; military junta in, 83, 169, 171, 240n31, 242n46; “white terror,” 170, 173–74, 180, 241n43; in world wars, 107, 170, 228n16 Gržinić, Marina, 203n28 Habermas, Jurgen, 187 Haritos-Fatouros, Mika, 170–71, 208n32 Hegel, 29, 212n61 Hemon, Aleksandar, 18; Nowhere Man, 134–39, 147 Heidegger, Martin, 48–49 Herzfeld, Michael, 206n18, 226n52 homosexuality, 33–34, 93, 169, 209n35; and homosociality, 210nn41–42. See also masculinity identity: communal, 15, 26, 80, 192; gender, 81, 93; masculine, 91, 93, 172; national, 17, 47; politics of, 19, 43 Iphigenia, sacrifice of, 215n11 Irigaray, Luce, 22 Iveković, Rada, 25, 134, 206n15, 209n38 Jergović, Miljenko, 18, 235n70; Father, 182; Srda Is Singing on All Saints’ Night, 139–50, 182, 194, 235n73 Jusdanis, Gregory, 221n70

Kadare, Ismail, 17, 47, 220n41, 220nn51–52, 222n78; The Three-Arched Bridge, 55–57, 64–70, 74–78 Karadžić, Vuk, 9 Karatani, Kojin, 7, 78 Kazantzakis, Nikos: The Master Builder, 17, 46–53, 71, 78, 108, 215n10, 216n13 Kovačević, Nataša, 138 Kristeva, Julia: abjection, 26, 28–29, 90, 160, 217n19; matricide, 159–60; otherness, 89–90; semiotic and symbolic, 23–24, 85, 88; women and death, 208n26, 217n19 Kujundžić, Dragan, 60, 77 Lacan, Jacques, 23, 153 Leontis, Artemis, 57 lumpenproletariat, 44–45, 123, 228n15. See also Bataille, Georges: capitalism and excess Maglinis, Elias: Interrogation, 154–84 Makavejev, Dušan, 18, 114, 123, 206n12, 227n3; The Love Affair, or the Case of a Missing Switchboard Operator, 120; Sweet Movie, 191; WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 117–21, 233n50 Mandel, Ruth: The Bridge on the Arta, 61, 199n1 Marcuse, Herbert, 15, 213n67, 245n6 Marven, Lyn, 205n7, 237n9 Marx, Karl: 110, 121, 123, 191; Marxism, 44, 111, 122, 126, 186 masculinity: colonized 90–95; frustrated, 31–32, 112, 138; hegemonic, 17, 125, 192; hierarchy of, 36; and homosexuality, 210n41, 240nn34–35; and rape, 166–69 Mbembe, Achille, and necropolitics, 11–12 McClintock, Anne, 88 Megas, George, 9 Milutinović, Zoran, 62 Mitrović, Željko, 244n65 Mostov, Julie, 36, 168 Musha, Julia, 222n78 Nancy, Jean-Luc, on community, 41, 243n54 Nazi Germany, 34, 121, 212n58

Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), 129–130, 231n30 New Primitives, the, 130, 185 Nietzsche, 50–53; Opferstruktur, 53 1968, the year, 110, 126, 129, 185–86, 226n1, 227n3, 230n22 Oosterhuis, Harry, 210nn41–42 Ottoman Empire, the: in Andrić, 59–63, 217n22; and the Balkans, 54–55, 57, 106; in Fakinos, 68–70; in Fakinou, 99–104; in Galanaki, 80, 107–8; in Greek historical memory, 50, 95, 98, 225n47 Paglia, Camille, 33, 216n16 Panourgia, Neni, 180 pathogen, the, 8, 14, 42, 145, 189 Praxis (journal), 126, 226n1, 229n21 rape: in Fakinou, 80, 83, 99, 102; in Maglinis, 156, 171; of men, 35, 168–69, 210n41, 211n46; of women, 17, 27, 168, 207nn18– 19; in Žilnik, 110 revolution, 36, 43, 45, 186, 191; sexual, 118; socialist, 18, 110, 114, 123 revolt, 129, 194 Reich, Wilhelm, on desire and repression, 120–22 Rosić, Tatjana, 87 sacrifice, 2–17, 21, 35, 39–41, 51, 56, 58–59, 63–65, 72, 89, 121, 124, 133, 148, 159, 193–94, 197; and capitalism, 40, 44–45, 139, 187; of Christ, 105, 175–76, 184; female, 22–24, 28, 31–32, 50, 52–54, 61, 92, 112, 155, 190–91; legend of, 7, 12, 55, 143; performance of, 175; selfsacrifice, 15, 19, 45, 49, 71, 82–83, 109, 139, 238n24. See also Kristeva, Julia: matricide; lumpenproletariat; rape Salecl, Renata, 164, 174 Scarry, Elaine, 200n6, 200n9 Serbia: in Albahari, 154–57; and the EU, 195–96; and Kosovo, 201nn15–16, 234n54; “Memorandum,” 230n29; national body of, 30–31, 209n35, 207n19

Index

265

Silverman, Kaja, 167 Slapšak, Svetlana, 26, 114–15, 117, 119 Slovenia, 129, 204n28, 230nn28–29 social contract, 4, 6, 8, 10, 17, 38–40, 45 Sourbati, Athanasia, 88, 97 Spivak, Gayatri, 37 Stojanović, Lazar, 227n3, 233n50 subjectivation, 31, 85–88, 92, 159–60, 167 Tanović, Danis, 132, 222n73 Theweleit, Klaus, 35, 210n41 Tito, Josip Broz, 127–28, 134, 186, 226n1, 229m21, 230n22, 232n49, 233n51 torture: as emasculation, 169–70, 240n35; fiction of power, 66, 171, 173–75; women torturers, 208n32 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 174, 232n40, 239n26 Verdery, Katherine, 26, 206n12, 228n16 Velikonja, Mitja, 233n51 Vice, Sue, 37, 205n37, 246n10



266

Index

violence: chauvinist, 15, 34, 48, 111, 125, 131–33, 168, 209n35; foundational, 3, 6, 21–23, 28, 141, 202n18; state, 45, 169–70, 200n10, 203n28 Yugoslavia, 12, 73, 131, 134, 174, 180–81, 197, 201n16, 230n29, 244n66; as a failed community, 18–19, 112, 124–29, 186, 244n65; in Hemon, 136–42; in Jergović, 140–49; wars of dissolution, 35, 46, 48–49, 125, 155; in world wars, 61, 124, 128, 140, 181–82, 201nn15–16, 219n37, 236m6, 241n38; Yugonostalgia, 232n40 Žarkov, Dubravka: hegemonic masculinity, 36; rape, 169, 206n17, 207n19, 211n46, 240n35. See also masculinity: and rape Žilnik, Želimir, 18; Early Works, 110–17, 123, 193, 227nn3–4 Žižek, Slavoj: the big Other, 66; displaced enjoyment, 42, 89; postmodern racism, 144–45, 231n33

SLAVIC STUDIES/CULTURAL THEORY

—Gregory Jusdanis, The Ohio State University “Historians do not generally doubt that intercommunal violence can plague any society on earth, but they are generally in agreement that different regions or sets of cultures express the causes and dynamics of that violence in unique ways. Tatjana Aleksić, in this solidly researched study, focuses on culture, specifically literature, as a way of describing intercommunal violence in the Balkans. What we see in examples from Serbia, Albania, Greece, Croatia, and Romania is that nationalist violence, or ‘ethnic conflict,’ in Southeastern Europe, is a kind of subordination of individuality to the perceived demands of centralized rule or state building.” —John K. Cox, North Dakota State University Living in one of the world’s most volatile regions, the people of the Balkans have witnessed almost unrelenting political, economic, and social upheaval. In response, many have looked to building communities, both psychologically and materially, as a means of survival in the wake of crumbling governments and states. The foundational structures of these communities often center on the concept of individual sacrifice for the good of the whole. The Sacrificed Body examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkans. Tatjana Aleksić further relates this theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. In numerous examples, ranging from literature to film and performance art, Aleksić views the theme of sacrifice and its relation to exclusion based on gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, or politics for the sake of community building. She finds that the sacrifice narrative becomes most prevalent during times of crisis brought on by wars, weak governments, foreign threats, or even globalizing tendencies. By employing cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies, Aleksić exposes a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

THE SACRIFICED BODY

“A multifaceted analysis of sacrifice and violence, Aleksić’s book will have a major impact on Balkan studies because it takes issue with feminism’s idealization of the female body; it conducts an analysis of cultural material from diverse nations; it shows the survival of key literary and cultural tropes; it demonstrates the interrelation between culture and politics, nation and state, literature and identity; and because it examines the victim without falling into the trap of victimology.”

ALEKSIC´

THE SACRIFICED BODY

BALKAN COMMUNITY BUILDING AND THE FEAR OF FREEDOM

Tatjana Aleksić is associate professor of South Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS www.upress.pitt.edu Cover image: I [ ] CU, Cooper Union, New York, April 2011. Courtesy of Nataša Bojić Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

Aleksic_mech.indd 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6261-8 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6261-6

PITTSBURGH

TATJANA ALEKSIC´ 9/9/13 12:51 PM