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Is the Balkans the Unconscious of Europe?
Zizek's rise to global prominence in the 1990s as a Lacanian Marxist paralleled the collapse of Real Socialism in Eastern Europe and the violent disintegration of his native Yugoslavia. In various commentaries, books, articles and interviews on the horrific and senseless interethnic violence in Yugoslavia, Zizek has succeeded in representing the complex social and historical realities of the Balkans as the geopolitical analogue of the Lacanian Real . By claiming that "[t]he Balkans is the unconscious of Europe" (Zizek, 2008, p. 1) 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. A French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, had a wonderful saying - maybe you know it - where he says, " Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l'autre, vous êtes foutu " If you are caught into another person's dreams you are fucked, finished. (p. 1)
The notion of the Balkans as the unconscious of Europe is not Zizek's alone. Mladen Dolar (1990) invoked it first, specifically with 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 ("the caves of Saint Cangian") (Masson, 1985, p. 309) Freud (1898) 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" (p. 309). In one cave Freud suddenly encountered 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...