"Maternal Space" and Intellectual Labor: Gramsci versus Kristeva and Žižek

“MATERNAL SPACE” AND INTELLECTUAL LABOR: GRAMSCI VERSUS KRISTEVA AND ŽIŽEK

DUŠAN I. BJELIC

Lacanian psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek have unarguably achieved iconic status as global intellectuals. The sheer volume of their work has generated an equally industrial-sized body of criticism. However, most of that criticism has taken their work at face value and so as stemming solely from the tradition of European philosophy and psychoanalysis. In what follows, I bring to bear a specifically Balkan gaze upon Kristeva’s and Žižek’s respective discourses by pursuing Antonio Gramsci’s concept of intellectual labor as the “philosophy of praxis’—“that is the relationship between human will (superstructure) and economic structure” (Gramsci, 1999, 403)—and its self-empowerment through marginal geography. In doing so, I look to examine the tensions between Kristeva’s and Žižek’s Balkan origins and their self-proclaimed universalism and cosmopolitanism. I thus locate the discourse-geography of the Balkans as the hidden contingency of their intellectual work. Following Gramsci’s geographic approach to the critique of cultural hegemony, two relevant points for literary theory could be learned from Kristeva’s and Žižek’s respective authorships. First, the silent self-purification from the pathologic residue of the maternal space operates in their writings as a geopolitical initiation into their cosmopolitan and universalistic self-presentation. Second, their psychoanalysis of the Balkans advances a new type of intellectual labor, that of the manager of symbolic normality. Despite their revolutionary contributions respectively to theorizing poetic language and to the critique of ideology, I argue here that their political praxis on the question of marginal geography is radically conservative.

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 41.2 Spring 2014Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286© West Chester University 2014

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30 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 41.2 Spring 2014

Kristeva’s and Žižek’s writings, interviews, and lectures about the Balkans at the time of the destructive collapse of East European Socialism right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall represent rare cases of the psychoanalysis of a specific geography. Central to their new psychoanalytic sub-discipline is an anti-geographic subjectivity pitted against the maternal space as the precondition for their own Oedipalized subjectivity’s full integration into the symbolic authority of “French Theory” with a geopolitical mission; “‘French Theory’ and ‘continental philosophy’ have become forms of protest in many countries all around the world” (Kristeva, 2010, 19). Considering the importance of the relation of intellectual labor to geography at the time of the fragmentation and the marginalization of manual labor of global capitalism, and conceptualizing their intellectual production more broadly, I invoke some basic Gramscian concepts, such as the centrality of geographic and historical specificity to both intellectual labor and the internal plurality of the subject.

In particular, Gramsci’s strategic insistence on the centrality of geographic and historical specificity is chiefly resonant in the tension today between the homogenization of global capitalism and the cultural diversity of manual labor as signified by local geography. Gramsci’s work is also foundational to the interdisciplinary area of cultural studies, which includes Balkan and other “area” studies (Gramsci, 1999, 105). Many academics and writers working in these fields are themselves expatriates who write about their own subaltern maternal spaces and their dislocation generates a radical resistance to the cultural orthodoxy of their host nations, the current neo-colonial centers.

SOME THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES CONCERNING INTELLECTUAL LABOR

According to the structuralists, language as a system of signification is constitutive of the subject as an interpellated ideological structure ordering things and people and is a prerequisite for their material production. Language thus creates rather than simply representing realities in its own key. Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan defined this new intellectual labor as the production of a new language. In his essay “Freud and Lacan,” Althusser outlines the principles of the new intellectual labor as the self-interpellated mastery evident in the production of “mature language.” Freud, he posited, was “a fatherless child” (Althusser, 2001, 133) of the nineteenth century along with Marx and Nietzsche, becoming, so to speak, his own father by way of inventing the theory of the unconscious. Defining intellectual labor as the production of theory for the sake of theory, Althusser foreclosed manual labor from a revolutionary praxis and so broke with Marx’s and Gramsci’s critiques of the capitalistic splitting of manual and mental labor.

It is precisely this discovery of the language of the unconscious that is responsible for the splitting of labor as the precondition for emancipation, whereby emancipation means self-mastery over the unconscious. While theory is analytic and by definition rational, manual labor is left to the body, nature, particular geography, and to a raw desire, and is thus incapable of speaking

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for itself other than in symptoms. Shifting the social and historical conditions of emancipation to psycho-linguistic work alone, the split between analytic language and the symptomatic language of the unconscious calls in the name of normative order for the capturing of the latter by the interpretative mastery of the former. Lacan addressed the failures of the French left amid the Sixty-Eight student revolts by pressing upon the split as the point of the mastery of the analytical and as indicative of the split of the two labors. At one public event he said to the students:

As revolutionaries what you long for is a master, you’ll get one. . . . I’m only a liberal, like everyone else, insofar as I’m anti-progressive. Except for the fact that I’m caught up in a movement that ought to be called progressive, because it’s progressive to contemplate the founding of psychoanalytic discourse, since that completes the circle that might enable you to identify exactly what it is you’re rebelling against. (Quoted in Roudinesco 1997, 343)

What Lacan described here as “progressive,” or a symptom of his psychoanalytic management, is precisely a reference to Althusser’s valorization of “the founding of the psychoanalytic discourse” for revolutionary practice. But then to appropriate Althusser’s revolution as revolution in theory rather than in a factory or on a street, Lacan reversed the “progressive” into “anti-progressive” in order to address hierarchically the students’ “manual” production of revolution in terms of the sons’ libidinal revolt against the Father. From the Master’s perspective, if “progressive” is supposed to stand for the anti-paternal politics of the emancipation of the subject his analytical labor is anti-progressive. This “manual” production of psychic resistance to the Master Lacan registers only as failing to recognize the students’/sons’ true desire for mastery, a desire for “a conceptual hold on the unconscious” (Althusser 2001, 145). The student’s misrecognition of the actual (unconscious) cause of their rebellion demands a psychoanalytic clarification and management. This clarification further calls for a new type of worker tied to the production of the language of desire for self-mastery. In other words, placing non-theorized desire at the center of social production, Lacan articulates intellectual labor as the management of the raw desire of manual labor according to the Law of castration.

Considering the larger social context of global capitalism and its infrastructural link between the Oedipalized family and the nation-state we should consider at this juncture Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critical point that “Oedipus is the baited image with which desire allows itself to be caught” (2003, 166). If we add to this warning the shared meta-rationality of an abstract symbolic violence between the global market and the interior of the “French Oedipus” (Kristeva, 2002b, 74), we are encouraged to agree with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of global capitalism as the unity of nations and national identities structured around an Oedipalized desire, the universal structure of the civilized subject. Deleuze and Guattari further include the significance of geography: “Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our

Dušan Bjelić | ESSAYS 3 1

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intimate colonial education” (2003, 170). The Oedipalized family is the button buttoning up the colonial overcoat. Unavoidably then, pure theory runs aground into a particularism of colonial geography as if it were an empty geography to be internally colonized with the language of desire in order for the symbolic to integrate it culturally into the system of global exploitation. Considering geography only as a colonial space is characteristic of the psychoanalytic political unconscious in a need of “conceptual control,” hence “the colonized resists oeadipalization, and oedipalization tends to close around him” (169).

It is worth considering the theoretical and geopolitical consequences of such a theoretical orthodoxy; and in this connection we might recall Michel Foucault’s reference to such a new type of intellectual workers as “the terrorists of theory” (quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, 2003, xii). If we accept Althusser’s notion of the production of subjectivity in the Lacanian key of the symbolic Terror of the Master Signifier—which confronts the subject as “the alienating vel,” forces the subject to choose between “freedom or death!” (Lacan 1998, 213), splits the unitary being on the real and the Symbolic, fills this gap with the desire so as to create the subject as the precondition for the material production and reproduction of the economic infrastructure—then to theory as subjectivized language also corresponds a certain kind of terror-based economic Signifier. If the production of language becomes a fundamental praxis interpellating an economic order via the symbolic violence of language, then the symbolic terror of theory over manual labor is of the same kind as the symbolic violence of the theory of financial derivatives. “There is, indeed,” Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee point out, “mounting evidence that speculative capital is producing what people on this periphery experience as abstract symbolic violence” (LiPuma and Lee, 2004, 26). If the theory of financial derivatives produces an economy as its thing irreducible to an actual economy but reducible only to the abstract symbolic violence of the theory of financial derivatives, by analogy we may conceptualize the psychoanalytic subject in its reducibility to the abstract symbolic violence of language as an equivalent to a theoretical derivative aimed at producing “human capital” (Foucault 2008, 226). In both instances the object of this symbolic violence is manual labor politically and legally locked into the particularity of its geography, which engenders a strategically disadvantageous location for manual labor that is simultaneously advantageous for financial capital. The parallel between the two economies of symbolic violence further suggests the sharing of the same split world, the split between theory (“mature language”) and abjected manual labor (geography): the split between Wall Street and Bangladesh’s garment factories can therefore be seen as an equivalent to the strategic split between Lacan and the student revolutionary. If we examine Althusser on this point from the perspective of today’s economy of financial capitalism which has geographically and structurally split labor on developed and undeveloped geographies, we can argue that in fact Althusser articulated, with the help of Lacan, an intellectual pattern for the global economy in which mental labor is its global banker. Perhaps here we can locate the birth of intellectual branding recognized in its production

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of meta-language and the management of desire circulating the “French Oedipus” globally as if it were a financial derivative.

For Gramsci, on the other hand, the unity of manual and mental labor was essential for intellectual resistance to the hegemony of capitalist society. In his philosophy of praxis, rationality is neither split between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, or industrial and erotic, nor is decoupled from local geography and histories: “In philosophy [it is] praxis, that is, the relationship between human will (superstructure) and economic structure” (1999, 402–3). To put it simply, the foreclosure of manual labor and its geography from the theory of the subject is reactionary in so far as it liquidates philosophy’s role as the mediating will between economy and culture. The Gramscian locus of the subject, then, could not be in the self-referential language of la théorie pour la théorie but in language as the unity of history and geography. Consider the note:

What would North-South or East-West mean without man? They are real relationships and yet they would not exist without man and without the development of civilization. Obviously East and West are arbitrary and conventional, that is historical constructions, since outside or real history every point on the earth is East and West at the same time. (Gramsci 1999, 447)

Gramsci’s reflection raises the question: can the language of the split subject premised on split labor be possible if the unitary split between history and geography has not been already inscribed into the psychoanalytic subject? Underneath the machinery of capitalistic splitting, fragmenting, and forgetting, Gramsci excavates the unitary veins of the shared histories and geographies pulsating through living labor. For Gramsci, the subject presented in this vein, acting from various points of resistance beyond political institutions and traditional Marxist revolutionary thinking, transcends imposed divisions and opens strategic opportunities for resistance to hegemony, thus negating Cartesian exclusionary subjectivity. In place of the self as abstraction, Gramsci offers the intersubjectivity of histories and geographies reflected in the internal plurality of a subject who speaks from a specific historical and geographic location as the nodal point accounting for the inventory of the “infinity of traces”: “The starting-point of critical elaboration in the consciousness of what one really is, and ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory” (324). Gramsci was also able to conceptualize the intimate, historical, and geographical intersections of his own life as a heuristic source of new alliances and resistances. Gramsci’s conception of an intersubjectivity that is embedded historically and geographically not only questions the Lacanian split subject but also Kristeva’s and Žižek’s reliance on such a universal scheme with their conceptual hold on the Balkans as if it were Europe’s unconscious. And while Žižek and Kristeva make a radical split between the civilized West and the archaic Balkans, Gramsci’s origins in the poor, rural South of Italy led him to close the gap as the precondition both of labor’s unity as well as his subjectivity. In this regard, psychoanalysis and its relation to manual labor exhibited in Gramsci’s time of servitude to capital rather than to labor.


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Gramsci’s observation and experience of class identity formation in the extremely diverse cultural and economic regions of early twentieth-century Italy led him to an awareness of the significance of cultural diversity in a productive class conflict, a revision and extension of Marxist economic determinism (Hall 1986). Gramsci characterized the high functionality of American labor in terms of the diversity of the labor composition of the capitalist market homogenized under the sign of labor’s “rational demographic composition” (Gramsci 1999, 281). It is such universalization and Taylorization of the labor market that called for the objectivizing desire manufactured by psychoanalytic language. Writing from his jail cell in 1928, Gramsci had already “caught the connection between Fordism and psychoanalysis” (Zaretsky, 2008, 95):

The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized. (Gramsci, 1999, 296-7)

In other words, the rationalization of production requires an abstract symbolic violence handled by the Fordist managerial elite against manual labor’s pre-symbolic sexuality with the demand that sexuality be placed under the sign of the universal Law represented by the management of manual labor. This rationalization acts as the precondition for successful application of Fordist principles to industrial production and the development of “the new type of man” (297).

Gramsci thus situates psychoanalysis at the very center of the Fordist model: “Regulation” of sexual instincts, because of the contradictions it creates and the perversions that are attributed to it, seems particularly “unnatural.” Hence the frequency of appeals to “nature” in this area. “Psycho-analytical” literature is also a kind of criticism of the regulation of sexual instincts in a form which often recalls the Enlightenment, as in its creation of a new myth of the “savage” on a sexual basis (including relations between parents and children). (Gramsci 1999, 294-5)

In this brief passage, Gramsci addresses the relation of industrial capitalism to the Oedipal structuration of labor. The productivity of labor, he discerns, has an intimate erotic dimension; unsignified desire obstructs the planned conditions of production. Psychoanalysis, in its dual role of promoting the language of sexual emancipation and regimenting sexuality, resolves the contradictions of capitalism by deploying an Oedipal structure into labor’s intimate interpellation. Thus Gramsci’s critique of the Fordist dimension of psychoanalysis establishes the space for the critique of the present day neoliberal “debt economy” based on “the subjective essence of production” from the perspective of the Anti-Oedipus (Lazzarato, 2011, 56). It identifies this economy as being built on the personal ethics of producing oneself as the labor capital, “your capital or your labor capital” (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, 251). To situate this point in the context of the analysis above: if the subject is the subject of language and psychoanalytic language is a language of taking care of one’s debt to the Law of Castration, then the neoliberal economic matrix—which, “requires a subject capable of

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accounting for himself as a future subject, a subject capable of promising and keeping a promise, a subject that works on the self” (Lazzarato 2011, 88)—is operative in the very making of the indebted subject who takes his/her future on loan from the bank of psychoanalytic language.

For Gramsci, because capital’s fracturing of labor is sustained by split geographies, “spatial consciousness” is essential for intellectual labor to find a remedy and open up points of anti-hegemonic resistance. Consistent with his anti-Hegelian rejection of an idealistic temporalization of history, Gramsci went to a great deal of intellectual effort to locate histories in a specific geography in order to reconcile the gap between the Italian industrialized North and the marginalized and under-represented rural South as the philosophy of praxis’ central task. To this end, the marginal geography of the Balkans at the time of the social crises and ethnic conflicts during the 1990s has founded an articulated discourse on balkanism as a discourse-geography of that underrepresented space. Maria Todorova elaborates balkanism as relation but not identical with Orientalism:

By being geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as “the other” within, the Balkans have been able to absorb conveniently a number of externalized political, ideological, and cultural frustrations stemming from tensions and contradictions inherent to the regions for the societies outside the Balkans. Balkanism became, in time, a convenient substitute for the emotional discharge that Orientalism provided, exempting the West from charges of racism, colonialism, eurocentrism, and Christian intolerance against Islam. (Todorova 1997, 88)

BALKANISM AND THE SPLIT GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE

The split between the internal-universal and external-local (geographic) and the significational transaction between these two contexts replicate the ushering in of European universality by the Enlightenment, when the Western part of Europe created its marginal space by relegating the Eastern part to a “second serfdom” (Okey 1986, 27). As historians have recently argued, Voltaire and the Enlightenment divided European space into the rational West and the irrational East, a division that has shaped the Western discourse of rationality (including psychoanalysis) along the lines of colonial exclusions. The philosophy of the Enlightenment constructed Eastern Europe and the Balkans as the dangerous exterior, “as a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe” (Wolff 1994, 7), the place of Europe’s forbidden desire, of vampires, unruly feminine sexuality, and tribalism. That is, all that the West had to discharge in order to become the center of the world was ascribed to the East as the constitutive dark counterpoint to the Enlightenment. Relations here have traditionally been fixed by a sort of “cognitive paranoia,” whereby the West constructs the identity of the “other” part of Europe—known to Freud as well as to Žižek (Neuman 1999, ix). Lacking its own Enlightenment and


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corresponding Eastern European Cartesianism, this geopolitical “other” either submits by internalizing the externally imposed identity, or completely rejects it. So when Žižek insists that cogito is “the authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, which occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes ‘for-itself,’ directly experienced as such (as universal)” (2007), he subscribes to the Enlightenment’s “cognitive paranoia” about European space since the explosion of the universal has its geopolitical location on a map of Europe that privileges its western side over its eastern side.

Bulgarian-American historian Maria Todorova established the discursive venue on balkanism with her book Imagining the Balkans (1997), which considers the history of the Balkans as a casualty of Eurocentric symbolic violence since the Enlightenment. She posits that what we know about the Balkans can’t be separated from how we know, as the essence of the question, ‘What is the Balkans?’ can’t be answered without examining the conditions of knowledge about the region. The Balkans as a stable representational scheme, which originated in Western travelogues, literature, and journalism may now be seen as a discursive problem rather than as “truth.” When Todorova named this process of representation “balkanism,” she named two contradictory elements: the Balkans as an object explained by rational knowledge and a space abandoned by rational knowledge (1997, 18). Todorova acknowledges the Orientalist character of balkanist discourse, but as Milica Bakić-Hayden writes, “Todorova shows that balkanism independently developed a rhetorical arsenal of its own via its specific geo-political religious and cultural position” (1995, 920). Bakić-Hayden goes on to elucidate “nesting orientalisms” as an important element in Balkan identity-formation. According to this scheme, in the Balkans “the designation of ‘other’ has been appropriated and manipulated by those who have themselves been designated as such in Orientalist discourse” (922). Specifically, the Slovenes see themselves as more civilized than the Serbs, who are farther east; the Serbs, in turn, see themselves as more civilized than the Albanians. In addition, such representational schemes based on spatial hierarchies have been internalized as essential identities because they allow and justify the exclusion of the Other.

The Slovene sociologist Rastko Močnik interrogates the status and function of balkanism within the context of globalization. According to Močnik, two major a priori structures of domination and subordination govern balkanism as politics and as identity: the first is a horizontal antagonism among the Balkan ethnies, in which each of them is a potential aggressor; the second is a vertical system of cooperation between each of these parties and the European Union. Within this system of antagonisms and cooperation, the stereotypes of Balkan character emerge as knowledge and as identities. Balkan identity becomes complete only when the geopolitical map has been fully inscribed and reflected as an ambiguous and incomplete self and as such it is a supplement to global ideology in its very archaic closeness.

In place of Gramsci’s model of social praxis as unity of mental and manual labor, language and geography, Kristeva and Žižek offer a radical split between

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the two in their psychoanalysis of the Balkans. They assign to their own intellectual labor the task of managing the desire of the new type of worker. They have universalized the crisis of global capitalism by deploying the universality of human subjectivity as a license for a managerial subject. But, unlike Gramsci, they believe that pure capitalism—Kristeva’s Gaullist version or Žižek’s Leninist version of political mastery—is better than living under the conditions of the failing modernity of the Balkans. The psychoanalysis of the Balkans is a case in point. Kristeva calls Bulgaria her “maternal space” (Kristeva, 1987, 41) to be abjected, and declares “impurity as maternal” (Kristeva, 2000b, 21); Žižek invokes the “maternal superego” of the Balkans as “the Slovene national fantasy” (Žižek, 1996, 55n), erupting in ethnic nationalism to be submitted to the Law of the single market of the European symbolic. In such pronouncements, the intellectual task of universalizing the crisis of the post-Communist Balkans resolves into self-Orientalization: that is, identifying the “archaic” feminine in themselves and then splitting from it as a prerequisite for cosmopolitan and universal intellectual labor, with the Balkans as their geopolitical real. Kristeva’s and Žižek’s geographic asceticism subjugates the Balkans to the master signifier of Oedipal orthodoxy, so erasing the heterogeneity of histories and people. As a consequence, the erotics of resistance turns into an erotics of overidentification.

In elaborating the convergences in the work and personal histories of Kristeva and Žižek, I acknowledge and account for divergence within those areas, including in the circumstances of their displacement from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia respectively. I argue, however, that even with these differences, each offers an exclusionary discourse of radical conservatism framed in the language of desire as an idiosyncratic form of intellectual labor.

PÈRE-VERSION

Nineteen eighty-nine, the year the Berlin Wall fell, was a milestone for both Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek. It was the year Kristeva visited Bulgaria and began to comment sporadically on the Balkans and Bulgaria. That same year Žižek published his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Neoliberalism was on the rise, along with a general presumption of “the end of ideology” (Bell, 1988). Žižek not only refutes the death of ideology but also argues that the proclamation of its death represents ideology in its purest form. Ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia and elsewhere and the rise of European nationalism have proven Žižek correct in that argument. Writing in the context of the ideological storm raging in Yugoslavia, in vivid language that drew from continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and Anglo-Saxon popular culture, Žižek soon established himself as an East European political philosopher like none other, not only because of his ideas, but also because of the prodigious volume of his work. In addition, Žižek’s work, carried out in conjunction with his role as the most prominent member of what is now known


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as the Slovenian group of Lacanian psychoanalysis, was instrumental in revealing the existence of a flourishing philosophical scene in the formerly Marxist East.

Žižek was born and educated in Socialist Yugoslavia, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana and eventually completing a second dissertation while studying in Paris with Jacques-Alain Miller. The Lacanian Group in Slovenia began to coalesce around him as its political leader in the context of the final disintegration of the Yugoslav state and he and other members of the Group worked within the Slovene youth alternative movement as dissidents of the Slovene pro-Yugoslav Communist government. Two publications in particular nurtured this spirit of dissent: Mladina (Youth), run by the communist party’ youth, and Nova Revija (New Review), run by older, more nationalistic writers. Žižek began publishing in Mladina in the 1970s. Žižek was also the intellectual standard-bearer of another dissident group, NSK, Neue Slovenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art), an art collective composed of the rock group Laibach (German name for Ljubljana), the group of painters IRWIN, and the theater group Scipion Nasice (Sisters of Scipion Nasice). Promoting the idea of “culture as state,” Žižek and the NSK developed the dissident strategy of “overidentification” (Monroe, 2005, 110) which mocks the state by appearing to take it more seriously than it takes itself.

Becoming engaged in national politics through his collaboration with NSK and the Lacanians, Žižek was politically active during the formative years of the new Slovene state, running unsuccessfully for a seat on the collective presidency in 1991. The Socialist and multi-ethnic Yugoslavian state had officially nurtured progressive thinking around class divisions during a time of resurgent reactionary geopolitical and ethnic identifications, and the Lacanians were able to exploit the residual Marxist rhetoric of class equality while promulgating a psychoanalytic explanation for inter-ethnic violence, capturing the political and theoretical attention of the West. At this time when Yugoslavia was literally in flames, their discursive strategy was to identify the Balkans as the Lacanian real. By dislocatingthe real from Lacanian metapsychology where it signifies the limit of language, Slovene Lacanians recontextualized it as the geopolitical Real to mean the geographic limit of Western civilization; in such a capacity the new concept worked as theoretical reinforcement to the nationalist rhetoric of Balkan otherness in the new Slovenian state (Kuzmić, 1999).

The impetus toward the establishment of a Slovene state, and the success of Žižek’s and his Group’s psychoanalytically-mediated political praxis in that context had much to do with the Slovenes’ historical self-identification with Central Europe rather than with the Balkans. “Back to Europe where we always belonged” and “This is a choice between Europe and the Balkans,” proclaimed Janez Drnovsek, the leading member of Žižek’s political party and Prime Minister of Slovenia for ten years and President from 2002–2006. Historically, the concept of “Central Europe” has fluctuated according to the contingencies of European geopolitics, and it still fluctuates from nation to nation. Toward the end of the Cold War In the 1970s and 1980s, it gained fresh currency as an

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alternative to the East/West ideological and geopolitical binary by emphasizing culture and subjectivity, political dissent, ethnicity, and individual desire. Freud and psychoanalysis, as Central European avatars of modernity, have been an important influence on the post-Cold War construction of Eastern European cultural identity, with psychoanalysis becoming both the paradigm of Central European subjectivity and a discourse of dissent against the Communist’s political repression. Slovenia, a few hours by train from Vienna and the most liberal of all six Yugoslav republics, was fertile ground for such new expressions of dissent to take root and flourish.

Žižek’s rise to global prominence in the 1990s as a Lacanian Marxist paralleled the collapse of East European Socialism in Eastern Europe and the violent disintegration of his native Yugoslavia. In various commentaries, books, articles, and interviews on the horrific and senseless inter-ethnic violence in Yugoslavia, Žižek has succeeded in representing the complex social and historical realities of the Balkans as the geopolitical analogue of the Lacanian Real. By claiming that, “The Balkans is the unconscious of Europe” he discursively links the Balkans to global capitalism and multicultural democracy and thus circumvents Balkan exceptionalism.

The Balkans is structured like the unconscious of Europe, das Unbewusste Europas. Europe puts, projects all of its dirty secrets, obscenities and so on into the Balkans, which is why my formula for what is going on in [the Balkans] is not as people usually say, they are caught in their old dreams. . . . they can’t face people here . . . ordinary, modern, postmodern . . . whatever reality. No, I would say they are caught into dreams but not into their own dreams, into European dreams. (Žižek, 2008c)

The notion of the Balkans as the unconscious of Europe is not Žižek’s alone. Mladen Dolar, another prominent member of the group, invoked it first specifically in regard to Yugoslavia in his discussion of Freud’s “Easter trip” to Italy and Slovenia with his brother Alexander in the spring of 1898. During this trip, Freud and Alexander visited caves in the Slovenian Carso. In this subterranean space of the European continent, Freud observed the “gruesome miracle of nature, a subterranean river running through magnificent vaults, waterfalls, stalactite formations, pitch darkness, and slippery paths secured with iron railings. It was Tartarus itself” (Freud 1985, 309). In one cave Freud suddenly encounters Dr. Karl Lüger, the anti-Semitic Mayor of Vienna and head of the Christian Socialist party whom he saw as representative of political and anti-Semitic forces in Vienna likely to oppose his pending university promotion.

Yugoslavia is at once a metaphor of Europe’s unconscious and the stage upon which its desires are projected and played out. Freud himself created the essence of the Balkans’ subjectivity precisely by declaring them outside the zone of the particular mythology of psychoanalysis, claiming that people south of the Austrian border lack symbolic authority and are “unanalyzable.” The latter claim entered the annals of psychoanalysis in a letter from Freud to Trieste psychoanalyst Edoardo Weiss dated May 28, 1922. Weiss had solicited Freud’s advice about a Slovene patient suffering from sexual impotence who was not


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responding to therapy. This patient “had betrayed many people and had a very immoral ego” (Weiss, 1970, 34).

In his reply Freud makes clear that the people directly to the south of his native Austria—the Slovenes—do not meet the Oedipal civilizational standard. This is Freud’s response to Weiss’ complaint that a Slovene patient is not responding to therapy: “our analytical art when faced with such people, our perspicacity alone cannot break through to the dynamic relation which controls them” (quoted in Weiss, 1970, 37). Southern Slavs in general, Freud argued in his clinical history of the “Rat Man,” are anal; not only do they have a proclivity to sodomy, they also dream of shit as a sign of gold and good luck (Freud 1968b, 187–203).

The Lacanian group adopted Freud’s cognitive map of Europe as a basis for its own particular form of psycho-cultural discourse. This is apparent when Žižek, articulating a project of national rebirth through psychoanalysis, takes up the case of the failing Slovene Oedipus where Freud’s discussion with Weiss concerning the “immoral Slovene” leaves it. Instead of questioning Freud’s implicit geopolitical bias, Žižek overidentifies with Freud and returns to the original pronouncement of “unanalyzability” to diagnose the collective condition of the Slovene Oedipus:

The “immoral” Slovene mentioned does not just embody the paradoxical way enjoyment and the Law are linked, but hides yet another surprise, which leads to the key to the Slovene national fantasy, to the theme of the “maternal superego”, to the theme of the mother (not the father) as the bearer of the Law/Prohibition. (Žižek 1996, 55n)

According to Žižek’s Lacanian interpretation, Slovenes are excessively attached in their “national fantasy” to the Mother. The absence of the Father, the bearer of internal law/Prohibition, engenders a “national fantasy” formed around the maternal prohibition of external pleasures and creates an “impediment” to subjectivity expressed in the Slovene’s sexual impotence and immorality. Only the Symbolic and the internalized Law of the Father, through inner prohibition, engenders enjoyment as a form of transgression. And, Žižek concludes, “we Slovenes—‘unanalyzable” according to Freud—had to wait for Lacan to find a meeting with psychoanalysis; only with Lacan did psychoanalysis achieve a level of sophistication that rendered it capable of tackling such foul apparitions as the Slovenes”( Žižek, 1996, 9). In other words, Žižek accepts (with a level of self-irony) and perpetuates Freud’s privileged perspective and the Lacanian psychoanalytic vocabulary as the site of national self-transformation. And when subjectivity has been restored to Slovenia, what becomes of the “unanalyzable” identity attributed to it by Freud and Žižek? It may be transferred to the “other” Balkans via the Lacanian concept of the real, the pre-symbolic world. Not only has this discursive strategy reproduced the hoariest of representational clichés about Balkan violence, but is also self-Orientalizing in its adherence to the scheme of “nesting Orientalisms” in Balkan identity-formation.

Today, Žižek invokes concepts such as “class analysis” and “working class politics” in order to capture discourse on universality. But, as Ernesto Laclau

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trenchantly observes, “the notion of class is brought into Žižek’s analysis as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils” (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000, 79). We may add to Laclau’s analysis that when class analysis really mattered at a time when the disintegration of Yugoslavia could have been channeled in a direction other than nationalism and ethnic violence it was conspicuously absent from his discourse. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality appeared in 1994 when the Bosnian war was at its height. Instead of linking ethnic violence to class relations, Žižek links it to the lack of the Name-of-the-Father and jouissance féminine as “the primordial generative element” (Žižek 2005, 3, 1) of the Balkan ideology. His analysis of ethnic violence moves back and forth from sexual fantasy to real geography. In the context of his analysis, Dorothy Valens, the female protagonist of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, becomes a personified geography. Like her, Bosnia in the absence of the Father’s prohibitions, is “sliding into the abyss of absolute depression” from which she can only be lifted by the male’s fist, a sort of “electroshock therapy” to prevent self-destruction and place her in the “proper order of causality” (Žižek, 2005, 121). Žižek seems to suggest that the absence of the Name-of-the-Father engenders woman’s perverse fantasy and he links rape causally to the universal structure of the phallic authority. With this logic, Žižek also issues an implicit verdict on the Bosnian father. In the absence of his nation-state, the Bosnian father is incapable of asserting a proper symbolic authority. Thus in place of Law and prohibition, the Bosnian father figures only as a totem (Lacan 1987, 88), a phylogenetic supplement of feminine perverse enjoyment (Žižek 2005, 75).

Following Lacan, Žižek presents both facets of the “Father’s enjoyment” here: the symbolic and the pre-symbolic. The former sets the rules and parameters of normative order, and his joy is separate from the Real. The primitive father, on the other hand, is the owner of all women, the object of his sons’ hate, and the source of sexual violence. He is also exempt from castration. The Bosnian father hypothesized by Žižek epitomizes the pre-symbolic, the primitive, the Balkan Real, one who still enjoys by force the incestuous bond. As such, he is inseparable from the history of the established pathology of the place itself, as are the rest of the people living there. This particular Lacanian dyad of Père-Jouissance discursively replaces the “un-analyzable Slovene” with the Bosnian father as primitive other who is all too readily analyzable by Žižek himself as symbolic father and phallic authority.

In October, 2003, “In Search of Balkania,” an exhibition of avant-garde Balkan art, opened at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum in Graz. The aim of the exhibition was to revive the Balkans as “a site of intellectual endeavor and cultural desire” (Conover, Cufer, Weibel 2002, 2). A photograph of Žižek lying on Freud’s couch at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Austria, is reproduced in the exhibition catalog and was exhibited in Graz by IRWIN, the NSK art collective.1 The same photo adorns the back cover of Žižek’s book The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), while the front cover displays Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s painting The Virgin and Child. 2 Both images refer to Freud’s


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visit to Trebinje (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in September 1898, and to his first paper on the unconscious “The Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness” published the same year in Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. The article in question concerns Freud’s forgetting of the proper name of an Italian painter, Luca Signorelli. The names “Botticelli” and “Boltraffio” kept coming to mind in place of “Signorelli.” Freud theorized that his forgetting the name was the result of the unconscious mechanism of sexual repression.

The constellation of signifiers in the IRWIN photograph of Žižek suggests the following: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic couch was covered with a carpet sent to him from Salonika by his distant relative (and future brother-in-law), Moritz Freud (Jones, 1954, 2). Moritz, in addition to being a carpet dealer, was also rumored to be involved in the white-slave trade. Historian Peter J. Swales suggests that Freud may not only have suspected this, but may have enjoyed the possibility that the carpet in his therapy room bore a tenuous connection to the reputed Turkish excess of sexuality (2003, 62). As Freud reported in his article, a colleague “had told me what overriding importance these Bosnians attached to sexual enjoyment. One of his patients said to him once: ‘Herr, you must know, that if that comes to an end then life is of no value’” (Freud 1968a, 292). In the IRWIN photograph, the “un-analyzable Slovene” lies in a position to be analyzed not by Freud but by the symbolic Other immanent in the mise en scène. He rests on “Bosnian” carpets, boxed as if in utero on the day of Lacan’s birth, with Courbet’s painting, L’Origine du Monde, hanging above him—the painting was originally commissioned by Halil Bey, a Turkish diplomat and collector of erotica. When the diplomat was called back to Istanbul from Paris, the painting came eventually into the possession of Lacan’s second wife Sylvie Bataille-Lacan, the former wife of Georges Bataille.

During his short visit to Trebinje, Freud walked upon the carpets of what may have been presented to him as a former Turkish harem that had become a tourist attraction. The visit to the harem, Swales explains, could well have evoked the exotic aura of the carpet on his consulting couch at 19 Berggasse, and conjured up a fantasy of himself as a sexual despot in a seraglio inhabited by female patients lying upon the famous couch, ready for analysis as a kind of “epistemological coitus” (Swales, 2003, 62). “And here,” Swales concludes his study of Freud’s visit to Herzegovina, “I allude, of course, to how over time Freud would create for himself a de facto harem—Martha, Minna, Emma, Fanny, Marie, Helen, Lou, Anna, the Princess, etc.—with the royal couch as its very organizing principle” (Swales, 2003, 62).3

BULGARIE, MA SOUS-FRANCE

The history of Julia Kristeva’s dislocation from her Bulgarian origins is well known. She was born in 1941 and received a largely francophone education. After graduating from the University of Sofia with a degree in linguistics she received a scholarship from the French government in 1965 that enabled her to

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pursue graduate studies in Paris, where she quickly made her mark on the French intellectual scene, studying with such eminent scholars as Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Emil Benveniste among others. Soon after her arrival in Paris she became part of a circle of intellectuals identified with the avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel (she eventually married one of its founding editors, writer Philippe Sollers). She herself published in the journal as did Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and other prominent figures of the Parisian literary scene. She was at first a Marxist and student rebel, then she began studying with Lacan and incorporating his ideas on subjectivity into her work on structural linguistics. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), one of Kristeva’s doctoral theses, combined Bakhtin’s Marxist theory of polyphony in language with the Lacanian notion of the split subject, a unique theoretical position reconciling bourgeois aesthetics with the revolutionary field of text. It was this work which definitively launched her as the leading literary theorist of her time.

Although an important representative of French theory in general and French psychoanalysis in particular, Kristeva cannot as easily be allied as Žižek with Lacan and even less with Althusser, whom she remembers as “the most ‘Stalinist’” among the Marxists at the time when she stopped regarding herself as a Marxist (Kristeva 2002b, 13). However, in her psychoanalysis of the Balkans there is significant overlap not only with Žižek’s terror of the symbolic against the maternal space, but also with Lacan and Althusser.

While Althusser’s reception of Freud stresses the production of theory, neither Kristeva’s reception of Freud nor her work, she insists, can “be reduced to the production of ‘theory’” (2010, 19). Where Althusser locks his subject into monolithic ideological structures as a unitary construct and confronts social contradictions such as class struggle theoretically, according to Kristeva textual production opens her subject to the process of de-ideologization. In the place of theory as the practice of an objectifying signifying process, Kristeva places the “subject in process/on trial” (1984, 102) to signify an internalized psychic reception of social contradictions: “Heterogeneous contradictions here lie between the signifying process and the objective social process: it is the excess of one and through the other” (205). For Kristeva, in other words, Althusser’s conception of theory as social practice holds the status of the pre-history of the subject; Marxism has delivered the subject to a point of two exits. Either the proletariat as historic subject can remain “a unitary man, thus reinstating the paranoid subject of speculative thought, the State, and religion”; or, the subject can realize philosophy in rapturing itself, “in [which] case, the proletariat would represent the factor disseminating the unity of the subject and the State, exploding it in a heterogeneity that is irreducible to the agency of consciousness” (139). Because the latter involves knowledge and the desire for literature—that is it presupposes a mastery of reading and writing as well as the institutional privilege of such practices—the proletariat splits itself to produce the new type of mental worker, the auteur, while the manual labor foreclosed from the subject-in-process is relegated to the subject’s pre-history.


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A similar distinction applies to Lacan’s theory of the subject. Lacan’s “return to Freud” in terms of “language as the unconscious” opened the door for Kristeva’s resistance to structural linguistics from the position of the missing subject; Lacan’s dislocating of desire from biology to the “pure signifier” at the completion of the Oedipal emancipation from the maternal bond opened the door for Kristeva’s resistance to phallic monotheism from the position of a missing feminine subjectivity. While Lacan’s “pure signifier” acts in the capacity of the phallic terror directed to the genital excitement of the child toward the mother in order to set up the condition for the signifying process, it does not capture in toto the signifying process. This maternal “left over,” which Kristeva names the “semiotic chora” (1984, 25) to correspond to Freud’s biologic drive, not only is not suppressed in the process of signification but is a necessary dialectic component of that very process. She posits:

Our positing of the semiotic is obviously inseparable from a theory of the subject that takes into account the Freudian positing of the unconscious. We view the subject in language as decentering the transcendental ego, cutting through it, and opening it up to a dialectic in which its syntactic and categorical understanding is merely the liminary moment of the process, which is itself always acted upon by the relation to the process, which is itself always acted upon by the relation of the other dominated by the death drive and its productive reiteration of the “signifier.” (Kristeva, 1984, 30)

In Kristeva’s Oedipal dynamics, the maternal force decenters the subject from its transcendental location, and thanks to Kristeva’s literary re-signification of it, the reader hears the voice of an unrecognized motherhood. It is precisely Kristeva’s ability to open the reader’s sense for seeing and hearing the geno-textual infrastructure of the missing maternal voice that has instituted her as a global auteur.

In a word, Kristeva’s subjectivity belongs to an altogether different register than Althusser’s and Lacan’s. The latter two belong to the register of theoretical coherence, the former, to the practice of revolutionary incoherent textuality. It is as if Althusser and Lacan teach swimming in the classroom while Kristeva teaches it in deep water; to account for Kristeva’s subject in-process one has to spot it in its very action there and then where the artist rips off its semantic layers, turns the symbolic upside down, and refers to its own labor as an end product. To the extent that Kristeva brings the signifying process down to the very mud of the embodied work and builds up her narrative from it, she is much closer to Gramsci than to Lacan and Althusser. Her notion of culture as work approximates what Bruno Gulli emphasizes in Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis as “the totality of forms that go from production to artistic and poetic creation, from manual labor to philosophical activity” (2002). On that point Kristeva’s statement that “Work as process, whatever kind of work it may be—when it is being carried out (and not when it is reified according to the exchange structures of a particular society)—shares something with this signifying process” (Kristeva 1984, 104; emphasis in original), correlates to Gramsci’s own claim that “all men

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are philosophers” (Gramsci 1999, 323), precisely because manual labor does not exclude linguistic production. Kristeva further approximates Gramsci’s transformative heterogeneity of the symbolic hegemony of praxis by linking revolution in-process to the subject in-process:

In bypassing the very materiality of language, and therefore without disturbing the forms of linguistic exchange, revolutionary practice initially locates the signifying practice within the social real, but the landslides it produces there completely change all signifying structures as well. We shall therefore say that the explosion set off by practice-process within the social field and the strictly linguistic field are logically (if not chronologically) contemporaneous, and respond to the same principle of unstoppable breakthrough; they differ only in their field of application. (Kristeva, 1984, 104)

Kristeva’s subject is not a theoretical construct à la Althusser and Lacan precisely because it recapitulates the revolutionary process in the very landslide of the signifying structures as its ontogeny. The former locates “the signifying practice within the social realm,” the latter in the materiality of language—hence revolution in language equals subject in-process. While they differ in “their field of application” their logics are contemporaneous “and respond to the same principle of unstoppable breakthrough.” Marx, Kristeva reminds us, was cognizant of the fact that “the ramification of capitalist society makes it almost impossible for the signifying process to attack material and social obstacles, objective constraints, oppressive entities, and institutions directly” (1984, 105). Referencing Capital, she writes that the starting point of such an attack “lies beyond the sphere of actual material production” and within the sphere of “leisure and higher activity” common to art, which transforms “its possessor into a different subject, and it is a new subject that he will enter into the process of immediate production” (106). To this subversive end, Kristeva insists, “the productive process of the text thus belongs not to this established society, but to the social change that is inseparable from instinctual and linguistic change” (105).

Similarly, analyzing the noticeable absence of the “superstructure” in industrialized American society due to the total capturing of “‘creative-poetic’ energies” by the material production within Taylor’s system of social dressage, Gramsci pointed out that “the forces which direct this huge practical undertaking are not only repressive with respect to instrumental work (which is understandable), but are universally repressive.” Such a system cannot operate with maximum efficiency without labor’s libidinal investment in material production, and “this pressure involves a particular repression of sexual instincts” (Gramsci 1999, 299) and produces an automatism of life. Hence, Gramsci points out, it “explains why in America for example, a certain literary energy can be observed in those who reject the organization of a practical activity which is passed off as ‘epic’ in its own right” (1985, 114). Like Marx as well as Kristeva, Gramsci recognized that what Kristeva calls textuality and the “experience of pleasure” ventures outside the material production, creating in Gramsci’s terminology anti-hegemony and in Kristeva’s “the culture of revolt” (Kristeva 2000b, 6).


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Central to Kristeva’s “culture of revolt” and Gramsci’s anti-hegemony is their subject-position of exile—Kristeva from Bulgaria and Gramsci from Sardinia—and they both write from the location of the symbolically dominating North. Naturally, then, the lost geographies of the “maternal space” (Kristeva, 1987, 41) figure importantly in their works: in Kristeva’s authorship, Bulgaria assumes the position of personal referent to the “semiotic chora” (Kristeva, 1984, 25), while in Gramsci’s, this role is played by the Italian rural South, the subaltern Mezzogiorno (Gramsci, 1999, 97). Both geographies are charged with a libidinal force under-represented by the dominant symbolic and in such capacity they are deployed as points of resistance. Much as Kristeva’s poetic text discloses the internal fracturing of the subject by the forces of the semiotic chora, so geography fractures the subject of labor as the signifying process.

Gramsci’s essay the “Southern Question” occupies an almost identical role as an auto-poetic event of the subject as the “semiotic chora” in Kristeva’s analysis of the poetic text. After the unification of Italy, the North “enriched itself at the expense of the South” (Gramsci 1999, 71); to this economic asymmetry and geographic hierarchy corresponded the asymmetry and hierarchy of cultural and political representation which occurs in the split between the feminine and the symbolic. Because the subaltern South could not speak for itself and had no established public discourse, the North was able to form a system of geographic superstition steeped in racial narrative yet presented as “scientific truth.” Incapable of comprehending its symbolic-geographic privileges, the North concocted about the Southerners only “one explanation—the organic incapacity of the inhabitants, their barbarity, their biological inferiority” (Gramsci, 1999, 71). To put it in Kristeva’s vocabulary, the North abjected the South as if it were a woman, the pre-modern and archaic supplement necessary for the Northern subjectivity to assert its hegemony.

Speaking from the position of the subaltern, Gramsci stressed the importance of closing the geographic gap between Southern rural labor and Northern industrial labor for the labor movement itself. To this end, the task of the philosophy of praxis in response to the contemporary conjuncture was “quite specific and ‘original’ in its immediate relevance,” to generate a solution that would make the dominant worldview look like “a walking anachronism, a fossil, and not living in the modern world” (1999, 324). Gramsci explains:

To criticize one’s own conception of the world means therefore to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world. It therefore also means criticism of all previous philosophy, in so far as this has left stratified deposits in popular philosophy. The starting-point of critical elaboration in the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. (Gramsci, 1999, 324)

“The Southern Question” allows Gramsci to elevate a local geography to its universal significance. Finding the unity in history between split geographies, split labor could claim the subject in the new key only under the ruins of the

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hegemonic culture. The subject in the new key is not a private event but an intersection of shared histories and geographies. The “infinity of traces” offers to the competing and split social agencies the opportunity to record the “inventory” of their geographic and historic heterogeneity. The subject’s desire “to know thyself” is inseparable from its desire for knowing the other’s history. In this regard the subject in the new key is the subject always for and in the Other.

It is precisely Kristeva’s proximity to Gramsci’s spatial consciousness that underlies her revision of Lacan’s dictum “language is unconscious” by spreading it as though on a geographic map of the Balkans. This map is at the same time the locus of her exile. One can almost hear the polyphony of the “Southern Question” echoing in Kristeva’s notion of language, her own language, uttered in between the geno-textual Bulgarian undercurrent (“Bulgarian is an almost dead language for me”) supporting her French, “the only living one” (Kristeva, 2002a, 243). She unearths geographic layers as her intimate zone of language, “where language and the body rise from the dead in the pulse of a grafted French.” Kristeva writes:

It is this maternal memory, this warm and still speaking cadaver, a body within my body, that resonates with infrasonic vibrations and data, stifled loves and flagrant conflicts, Gregorian chants and mercenary slogans, childhood affections and miserable brutalities, political, economic, and ideological nonsense, people adrift or ambitious brutes, the profiteers and the idle, hurried speculators, aimless individualists who know no shame, and you, the casualties of history who try to capture it without knowing how, invisible Bulgarians, undesirables, a blank spot on the geographical map somber Balkans pierced through by a lack of curiosity about the West, where I am. (Kristeva, 2002a, 144–5)

But whereas Gramsci locates the subject’s heterogeneity and anti-hegemonic signification in split geographies and forgotten histories and sees marginal geography as the “original” problem with “immediate relevance” (1999, 324), Kristeva instead abjects her maternal space in the manner of the Italian North versus the Italian South. The collapse of East European Socialism and ethnic conflicts in the Balkans forced Kristeva, contrary to her theory of poetic language, to come out splitting her personal experience of Bulgaria and the Balkans from its heterogeneous geography and histories to produce two mutually exclusive politics of signification: textual and geopolitical. In her writing on the poetic text, the “maternal space” (Kristeva 1987, 41) as a “semiotic chora” (1984, 25) blasts the static structures of the symbolic with its motility of rhythm, and ruptures and coordinates the dialectics of the signifying process; but with regard to the geographic referent of her text, she renders the actual geography of her maternal space only in terms of a failed Oedipal primitivity and parochialism.

In her controversial essay “Bulgarie, ma Souffrance” (Bulgaria, My Suffering) she describes a return to her homeland in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here she laments the “garbage and flies on the streets of Sofia” (2000a, 174) and even more the lapses of taste revealed by the deteriorated state of the national language: “they stuffed into this poor language of sensitive peasants and naïve thinkers a whole arsenal of tasteless and rootless loanwords” (171).


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However, given her own disclosure that “Bulgarian is an almost dead language for me” (Kristeva 2002a, 243), one must question just how qualified she is to render judgment upon it. In “Images of Bulgaria in the Fiction of Julia Kristeva,” Bulgarian scholar Elena Gueorguieva elaborates on the autobiographical aspect of Kristeva’s fiction, pointing out that in the novel The Old Man and the Wolves, “Santa Barbara,” the novel’s setting, is a fictional representation of Bulgaria. It is a place where people have become “wolf like,” deeply steeped in murder and crime, where “aggression remains the only counterweight to depression” (Gueorguieva 2001, 215). And in a striking passage, “Bulgarie, ma Souffrance” addresses Bulgarians as if a Gramscian Northern intellectual (looking through the racial criminology of Cesare Lombroso) were addressing the Mezzagiorno’s “born criminal”:

You suffer from chaos, from vandalism, from violence. You suffer from the lack of authority. You suffer from corruption, the absence of initiative, the sloppiness that redoubles an unprecedented brutality on the individual level, the arrogance of the mafia and the scams of the newly rich. (Kristeva 2000a, 176)

The accumulation of pathological content in Kristeva’s textual rendition of the Balkans substitutes heterogeneous geographies and histories with a reductionist metaphor in the psychoanalytic key of the “mad mother” and “the impure as the maternal” (Kristeva 2000b, 21). In the backdrop of the “military and barbarous powers—as seen in the former Yugoslavia” (25), Kristeva shifts the tension between the maternal and the symbolic from dynamic relations to structures of purity and danger: “Now, identity must be kept autonomous and structurally pure in order to assure the survival not only of the living but also of the socious.” Mixing the theory of poetic language with the geopolitics of the West, she speaks in defense of the Symbolic under attack by the archaic substance of her maternal geography, arguing that “this corresponds to an archaic demand: ‘archaic’ from the point of view of the history of societies that survive only by differentiating themselves from others, establishing rigorous but guarded links with them” (21). Certainly the brutal ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia should be condemned as a betrayal of democratic values; but placed in a historic perspective, as Hannah Arendt’s central argument of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1994) points out, European nation-states since the First World War have operated as criminal organizations. If we add the preceding history of the colonialism of French Republicanism in terms of their mission civilizatrice, Balkan ethnic conflicts appear minor in comparison to the brutality and violence inflicted on the world by the agency of the dominant symbolic of Western civilization—German genocides in Namibia and Europe, French in North Africa and Madagascar, British in Kenya, German-French-British in China and Vietnam. In this regard, waging an Oedipal “revolt as a producer of purity” (Kristeva, 2000b, 25) against the archaic Balkans renders Kristeva’s psychoanalysis of the Balkans problematic to say the least.

The cosmopolitan intellectual in exile as defined by Kristeva locates his/her geography in the polyphone of intertextuality. Her reflections on Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, figure in Kristeva’s narration as a mix of personal idiosyncratic

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memory and tourist guide discourse presented as “a glorious memory”. Sofia is known for its European lack, a place “with no Renaissance or baroque treasures”; Kristeva has also said that “Sofia is depressing” (1996, 137), although “in Sofia, however, the old man’s new allies dream in Latin, in Byzantine, and in Europe” (140). Put together, her depression at the current state of Sofia and her nostalgic memories lead Kristeva to state that, “I am attached to Sofia in the same way one is shamefully yet loyally attached to women who are disgraceful because they lived too much” (137). But what if such polyphony consists of a system of stereotypes independent of the actual reality of the place—such as a Byzantine nature, an immersion in Orthodox Christianity, failed modernity, ethnic nationalism, parochial tribalism—that is, the tropes of balkanism (as Orientalism for the Orient) identified by Maria Todorova? Would not Kristeva’s intertextualizing of the Balkans make her cosmopolitan perspective, her “intimate revolt” against the “mad mother,” parochial? When she demands that Bulgarians “undergo a psychoanalysis or psychotherapy” (2000a, 182) in order to join European civilization successfully is she not using psychoanalysis and the culture of Western civilization as an instrument of theoretical violence against marginal geography? For example, Kristeva treats Per Filium, the theological text about the Orthodox notion of the Holy Trinity, as if it were the key for understanding and explaining the failed Oedipal dynamics of the Orthodox barbaric “mentality.” She writes that “the moral crisis of the former Communist bloc looks more disconsolate, with short-term perspectives and perhaps a more barbaric appearance, in the countries of Orthodox faith. Serbian neo-Fascism is the acme of this disaster” (2000a, 176–77; emphasis in original). For Kristeva, in Orthodox Christianity, unlike Western versions, the Father is an autocrat who produces abnormal sexual subject positions, feminine for the son and masculine for the daughter:

The bisexuality resulting from this fusional and sensual dyad enriches the sensitivity of the Orthodox man, but it is accompanied by a repression of castration anxiety—in favor of death anxiety. “I do not desire my mother; which may lead to sexual punishment. Now, I am the woman; hence I wish to die for the father”—this would be the syllogism of such a subjective configuration. (Kristeva, 2000a, 144)

On the basis of such a “syllogism,” Kristeva ventures to overly generalize the complex conditions of Balkan societies in transition. What she overlooks in her endeavor are the shortcomings of her intertextuality in this case: that textual production about the Balkans involves a history of discursive formations irreducible to her concept of the subject in-process. In fact, as Balkan scholars have demonstrated, balkanism as geopolitical intertextuality fails to confront the Balkans as a set of concrete histories and geographies but works instead to fortify the hegemony of Eurocentric system of values. In her essay “What’s so Byzantine about the Balkans?” Milica Bakić-Hyden warns that “Zoon politicon writes the history of homo religious” (2002, 65). “The real question here,” she writes, “is not about difference as such, but about the legitimacy of the valorization of differences, about the ability to acknowledge and respect those differences rather than structuring them in hierarches and favoring less different over more different


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(64). In light of such intertextual shortcomings it should come as no surprise that Kristeva follows Samuel Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations, in her account of the “two types of civilization” that are said to structure Europe (Kristeva 2010, 14). Citing his essay “Religion in the Third World” (1996), Kristeva identifies Huntingdon as one of “a number of observers whose opinion I share” in arguing “that, despite this apparent disaffection, religious traditions remain alive, and well” (2000a, 132).

It should be evident by now that Kristeva’s psychoanalysis of the Balkans fails to conform to her narrative about the “semiotization of the symbolic” (1984, 28). The “flow of jouissance into language” (79) is missing in her intertextualization of the Balkans—or it is flowing in a questionable direction. I am not suggesting that Kristeva’s mother-subject position in her literary theory is identical with the archaic drive, but rather that she is in between the drive and the symbolic mediating the child’s entrance into the symbolic so that it can speak from and for the paradox of its unique geography. Here is where the in-between-ness of her subject-position in her literary theory fails to sustain the Balkans’ location in-between West and East as a unique subject-position. Instead, Kristeva paradoxically assumes the masculine symbolic position common to Althusser, Lacan, and Žižek with all its foreclosed heterogeneities. The semiotization of the Eurocentric symbolic seems to be the task of French sociologist Étienne Balibar. Seeing the Balkans as a force pushing towards a productive semantic landslide for European identity rather than as a danger, he holds that “the fate of European identity as a whole has been played out in Yugoslavia and more generally in the Balkans” (2004, 6). The destiny of Europe hinges, Balibar argues, on the paradox of Europe’s external and internal borders, of which today’s Balkans is one of the effects. On the one hand, he explains, Europe claims a universalism and inclusiveness in relation to the entire continent and, on the basis of this inclusive external border, gives itself the right to intervene in the Balkans as a part of Europe. On the other hand, Europe has internal exclusionary borders precisely because of the Balkans, to guard its unifying principles against the danger of fragmentation.

Fortress Europe is constituted by its double borders of inclusion and exclusive inclusion, the EU interior courtyard and its Balkan exterior which partially includes the Balkans (Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria) and partially excludes the remaining nations as not yet European while in Europe. Such a mapping of Europe geopolitically positions the Balkans in the same structural ambiguity as the phallic orthodoxy does for woman in Kristeva’s own key. Regarding the Balkans only in terms of a failure to integrate into the symbolic, or to see the Balkans only through the lens of phallic balkanistic fantasy, Kristeva reanimates Žižek’s own ontology of woman as possible only as a masculine fantasy.

Žižek’s Hegelian take on Kristeva’s negative “pseudo-psychoanalytic cultural reductionism” is that it lacks in signifying terror (Žižek 2001). In In Defense of Lost Causes (2008b), Žižek formulates a concept of the “radical intellectual” epitomized by Robespierre and the Jacobins. By taking a personal stand against

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political positivism, the “radical intellectual” creates a psychology of collective effervescence out of a radical split between the universal and the particular. The inherent tragedy of the intellectual is the fact that terror is the means of achieving the radical split, is the labor of the “radical intellectual.” To clarify this labor, Žižek invokes Robespierre’s politics of Truth:

Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs. (Žižek 2008a, 159)

Whereas Hegel’s “original doxy” of Aufhebung objectifies the subject into the terror of the state (Žižek 1984, 69), for Žižek the radical intellectual the taking hold of state power in order to act according to the transcendent principle of “Truth” becomes the embodiment of an abstract principle. Terror is inherently philosophical in that it prevents the actualization of the particular, forcibly separating identity from consubstantial tradition and space; “this logic was brought to its extreme in the Jacobin Terror, where every individual was at least potentially excluded: every individual is branded by some ‘pathological’ stain (of corruption, egotism, etc.) and, as such, does not fit the notion of Man, so that guilt ultimately pertains to individual existence as such” (1994, 157–58). Thus terror, like a father figure, mediates the relation between the fullness of maternal substance and the ideal of universal abstraction.

Gramsci also regarded the Jacobins as radical intellectuals, but his view differs markedly from Žižek’s. To Gramsci, Jacobin terror is not an empty force but signifies the labor of organic intellectuals who deploy spatial consciousness to create a new social class. They lacked political support in Paris itself which was controlled by the Girondins, a moderate political group promoting federalism rather than the centralization of state power. Gramsci points out that Robespierre was therefore forced into a strategy of engaging the rural subaltern. When provincial troops joined the revolutionaries upon their return to Paris, the Jacobins won control of the city, which allowed them to initiate internal terror. “But this,” Gramsci emphasizes, “only happened after the whole territory had been won for the revolution” (1999, 81). To Gramsci the Jacobins’ deployment of political terror was neither purely psychological nor philosophical, but rather represented a clear calculus of territoriality and the force of the subaltern in managing the balance between terror and consent and was always historically informed (79). In contrast, Žižek’s characterization of Jacobin terror as judicial/political—a “constitutive crime” like the killing of the primal father, rather than the organic process of the historical production of a social class—actually works to conceal the subjugation of the subaltern by the Universal.

And yet, spatial consciousness played a significant role in Žižek’s revolutionary practice. When he returned to Slovenia after studying in Paris with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law and intellectual heir, he engaged his maternal subaltern as a strategic move on the way to conquering Paris, New York, and London. In Slovenia his group took over the avant-garde magazine Problemi and


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used it as a medium for channeling the precepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Slovenian public discourse. Mladen Dolar, who also studied with Miller in Paris, remembers his own and Žižek’s return to Slovenia in the 1980s as a sort of mission to establish a Lacanian outpost there, encouraged by Miller:

We had been publishing Lacan in Problemi and Analecta for years, and [Miller] was grateful for that. He thinks very strategically and didn’t have anyone else published in Eastern Europe. To him, we were the last stronghold of Western culture on the eastern front. (Boyton, 1998)

Miller’s injunction to Žižek and Dolar to spread the Lacanian gospel reflects not only a desire to establish psychoanalysis as a discursive hegemony on the “eastern front” (i.e. the Balkans spearheaded by Slovenia), it also shows Miller’s naturalization of the cognitive map of Europe, which since the Enlightenment had divided European space into the rational West and the irrational East, a division that has shaped Western discourse of rationality (including psychoanalysis) along the lines of colonial exclusion (Brennan 2006, 41–64). There is a geographic and historical, that is a Gramscian, component to Žižek’s Jacobinism. He attracted the attention of Western academia precisely on the heels of the ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia as the highbrow insider and the instant interpreter of the events in Yugoslavia (and in Romania) in the 1990s; that is, in his maternal space.

Roland Boer perceives Kristeva and Žižek as seeking a means of redemption or a “way to solve the ravages of capitalism”: Žižek has “recovered a militant Leninist Marxism through Pauline Christianity.” And, Boer posits, “their moves to Christianity function as substitutes for a sidelined Marxism (in Kristeva’s case) or as a complement to recovered Marxism (in Žižek’s case). And for both it is a redemptive program” (2007, 174). Kristeva has followed Arendt’s politics of personalized narrative and public aesthetics and Heidegger’s radical withdrawal from instrumental rationality into an authentic intimacy and therapy. On this path she has abandoned the Hegelian dialectical foundations of Marxism and particularly Hegel’s philosophy of the state—responsible, in her view, for state terror. Žižek, for his part, has returned to everything abandoned by Kristeva: the Hegelian philosophy of the negative, Leninism, and Maoism. Kristeva’s intimate democracy based on otherness and tolerance contrasts sharply with Žižek’s insistence on culture as state, working class politics, and hate. I must confess to some skepticism regarding Boer’s thesis that Kristeva and Žižek in their different ways sublimate the loss of socialism for the progressive cause through psychoanalysis and Christian love. I am inclined to argue, on the basis of the Gramscian emancipatory epistemology of praxis that, on the contrary, psychoanalysis and Christian love allow Kristeva and Žižek to be at home and to enjoy the contradictions of capitalism.

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NOTES

In memory of Rosemary Miller.1 The image can be seen on the Killing the Buddha blog at: http://killingthebuddha.com/

ktblog/theologians-zizek/.2 The front cover of The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity can be

seen at: <https://mitpress.mit.edu/covers/9780262740258.jpg>3 Peter Swales claims that there was a very personal component to Freud’s interest in

the sexuality of the “Bosnian Turks” and his subsequent trip to the Austrian subaltern territory. He harbored sexual fantasies about his youngest sister-in-law Minna, who lived with Freud’s family as nurse to his children and with whom he had traveled alone for a few weeks before his trip to Trebinje. Recent historical findings indicate that Freud and Minna consummated their relationship, which Jung claimed many years later to have learned from Minna herself. This scenario allows for the possibility that Freud’s putative fantasy in the midst of the old seraglio points to another primitive aspect of the East in Freud, the “archaic father” formulated many years later in his Totem and Taboo who, as the sexual despot of the primal horde, claimed all women for himself (Swales, 2003: 62n). See also, Franz Macijewski (2006; 2008). Regarding Freud as “primal father,” see Ralph Blumenthal (2006).

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DUŠAN I. BJELIC teaches criminology at the University of Southern Maine. His latest book is Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (2011).


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"Maternal Space" and Intellectual Labor: Gramsci versus Kristeva and Žižek

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