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The Balkans as the Imagined Other of Europe
In Imagining the Balkans , first published in 1997, Maria Todorova argues that the Balkans is an imaginary construction of the West of Europe, perpetually re-created to represent the European Other. It is the dialectical negation of the European Self - the negative mirror image of Europe. Todorova's analysis has been critically appropriated and re-interpreted by a number of Balkan intellectuals (Bjelic and Savic, 2002; Blagojevic et al , 2006). Zizek seems to have adopted a Todorovan stance in claiming that the Balkans is an imaginary construction onto which Europe projects its own Unconscious, an entire repressed realm of phantasms of liberated sex and aggression (constituting a dystopian world like that of Kusturica's Underground ) dreamed up by Europe itself. During the period of the post-Yugoslav wars in the Balkans, Slavoj Zizek (1992) wrote:
For a long time, the Balkans have been one of the privileged sites of fantastic investments. Gilles Deleuze said: 'Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l'autre, vous êtes foutu' - if you are caught in another's dream, you are lost. In ex-Yugoslavia, we are lost, not because of our primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened language of Europe but because we pay in flesh the price for being the stuff of others' dreams. The fantasy which organised the perception of ex-Yugoslavia is that of the Balkans as the Other of the West: the place of savage ethnic conflicts long ago overcome by civilised Europe.
The orientalizing Gaze has constituted the Orient as an essentially asymmetric, implacably dissonant Otherness that cannot be rendered intelligible within the interpretive frame of the European Subject. In other words, narratives of the Orient can be (and are) created by the European Imaginary, but in the last instance the Oriental 'makes no sense'; it thrusts against the Symbolic (of Europe). This radical asymmetry is the product of the enmity and exclusion originating from the Real, which renders the latter radically alien - the untranslatable Alien. Considering that the Balkans is geographically and culturally part of Europe, the balkanizing Gaze has constituted it as the Other, which is a mere negation of the European Self - the negative image of the "Same" -...