Content area
Full Text
Along with a number of contemporary scholars (Todorova, 1994, 1997; Wolff, 1994; Bakic-Hayden, 1995), Slavoj Zizek has proposed multiple and nuanced critiques of the West's construction of the Balkans. Zizek (2001b) is very attentive to how, ever since the mid-1990s, the Western media have continued to portray the Balkans as a "vortex of (self-) destructive ethnic passions, the exact opposite, almost a kind of photographic negative, of the tolerant coexistence of ethnic communities, a kind of multiculturalist paradise turned into a nightmare" (p. 3). The West essentializes, effectively "balkanizes" the Balkans, by replacing their "real geography" with an "imaginary cartography" (pp. 3-4). Indeed, the power of the Western imperial gaze is so strong that is has generated ripple effects among the local populations as well, both in the form of internal and mobile orientalisms (the Balkans always begin "somewhere else, a little bit more toward the southeast") and in the form of "inverted racism" (Kusturica's cinema pitting a full-blooded Balkan "machismo" against the anemic and repressed Western subjectivity) (ibid.). In short, the Balkans have come to constitute the "unconscious" of Europe, East and West (Zizek, 2008b).
To what extent, though, does Zizek's theory end up reproducing the gaze he so forcefully and legitimately criticizes? What if, similar to how the West evacuates the region, to only fill it up with the "Balkan ghosts" of its own imagination, Zizek too empties the Balkans of their peopled history and possibilities, in order to (try to) fill them up with (this time Western) specters? What if that operation inevitably failed, which might account for, among other things, the diminishing number of references to the Balkans in his more recent writings? I claim in this short essay that those questions are legitimate, and need to be answered in the affirmative. The reason for such an answer is that Zizek's political theory effectively erases, marks as unintelligible, a number of resistant bodies and practices in the Balkans. The erasure is constitutive of his thinking. To make my case, and given the constraints of space, I draw mostly on a recent text by Zizek (2008a), which demonstrates, in a condensed and almost laboratory version, as it were, some of the major limitations plaguing Slavoj Zizek's theoretical gaze.
Zizek's (2008a) Critical Inquiry