Scribd
Upload
21 views

Yugoslavia - To Slovenia

This document provides context on Yugoslavia and Slovenia, and the role of Slavoj Zizek within that context. It discusses how Yugoslavia formed as a state under Tito and moved towards a more open form of self-management socialism, but that this characterization is largely incorrect and served to spin a mythology. It notes that Zizek was politically active in Slovenia in the 1980s and stood for presidency in 1990 elections, and that we must understand the conceptual conditions in Yugoslavia that allowed Slovenia to emerge and for Zizek's work to develop.

Uploaded by

peterjohnjohn63
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
21 views

Yugoslavia - To Slovenia

This document provides context on Yugoslavia and Slovenia, and the role of Slavoj Zizek within that context. It discusses how Yugoslavia formed as a state under Tito and moved towards a more open form of self-management socialism, but that this characterization is largely incorrect and served to spin a mythology. It notes that Zizek was politically active in Slovenia in the 1980s and stood for presidency in 1990 elections, and that we must understand the conceptual conditions in Yugoslavia that allowed Slovenia to emerge and for Zizek's work to develop.

Uploaded by

peterjohnjohn63
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Yugoslavia – To Slovenia

This chapter is about the formation, operation and decomposition of the Yugoslav state, and it is
also of course about the role of the West in the reinvention of capitalism in Eastern Europe. How we
make sense of this, and how we position ourselves to applaud or bemoan the rise and fall of Tito,
self-management socialism, nationalist resistance and the new free- market moral majorities, will
influence how we read Zizek and his attempt to make sense of the process. The chapter provides
an understanding of how the amazing combinations of ideas in his writing were made possible, and
so we trace the conditions of possibility for the particular combination of theoretical resources in
Zizek’s work. However, the theoretical resources he uses from psychoanalysis and philosophy are
resources that are always distorted in some way in different geographical and historical settings.
The contradictory, mutating political conditions in Yugoslavia we are about to review are not, then,
merely the ‘context’ for how Hegel, Lacan and Marx were read and applied separately by Zizek, as if
he read them incorrectly and as if we can now put them together correctly.

Theoretical resources are always already distorted, and something of them always fails to represent
or capture adequately the world they take root in. The question is not merely how some ideas come
to be possible in certain social conditions as if we were then explaining them away,1 but how to
develop an analysis of how certain sets of concepts are put to work to grasp conditions that have
reached points of impossibility, breaking points. This is why it would be more accurate to say that we
are really outlining the conditions of impossibility for how the theories were put together byZizek.2
The history of Yugoslavia is precisely a history of deadlocks and breaking points, relations of
impossibility. And the sets of concepts that emerge should not then serve to solve or smooth over
what they attempted to grasp; instead, they too show something of that impossibility. That is why
these particular theoretical resources – Hegelian, Lacanian, Marxist – that attend to negativity, lack
and dialectical fracture, are so important. We could say that the conceptual architecture of the
different systems he uses was first built crookedly on the economic-political terrain of the Balkans,

11

12 SLAVOJ ZIZEK

before being rebuilt, just as unsteadily perhaps, for an academic audience outside.

Zizek, after being refused a lecturing post upon completion of his first two degrees in the University of
Ljubljana, and then working as a researcher and visitor at different places around the world, at last has a
position as Professor in the Department of Philosophy. Now it would be tempting to slide too quickly over
what it meant for him to have been ‘politically active in the alternative movement in Slovenia during the
80s’ and to have stood as ‘candidate for the presidency of the republic of Slovenia in the first multi-party
elections in 1990’ (as his little biography on the departmental website puts it).3 The years of intellectual
and political compromise and challenge in and against Yugoslavia were part of a dialectical process of the
making and unmaking of Stalinism. So what we need to grasp, then, are what the conditions of
impossibility of Yugoslavia were that made it possible for the Republic of Slovenia to appear, and so what
the conceptual conditions were for Zizek to appear as he did both here and there.

How Zizek appears here and there is precisely the issue, for conditions of impossibility also mark the
relationship between what we think we see when he appears to us and what has actually been going on
in Eastern Europe. This chapter traces the theoretical resources that organised philo- sophical and
political work in Yugoslavia and the way these were lived and reworked in Slovenia. If we want to
understand what Zizek is up to we need a good historical account, not to sum him up or explain him away
but to cut our way through the circuits of lies that have structured how Yugoslavia has often appeared to
the West. Then something different that includes Zizek can appear to us, something we can mark our own
theoretical positions against.

THE PERFECTION OF THE STATE

How can we begin to make sense of these conditions? Maybe like this: Tito steered the Yugoslav
revolution towards a more open, democratic form of self-management socialism, during which it was
necessary to break with Stalinist bureaucratic traditions and adopt a third-way non-aligned position
between capitalism and communism. The problem is that this character- isation is wrong in almost every
respect, but different versions of this representation of the Yugoslav state for its own populations, and
such images of Yugoslavia for the West, have served to spin a mythology that was potent enough to stifle
opposition for many years, and to discredit Marxism fairly efficiently along the way.4

Actually, the respect in which this characterisation is right lies not in any of the particular elements of the
description but in the space that the

YUGOSLAVIA – TO SLOVENIA 13

mythology opened up. This paradox, a space in which dissident academics were able to take the
bureaucracy at its word and enact the very freedoms it claimed to endorse, struck at the heart of one of
the impossible points where the hypocrisy of the regime could then be made to implode. In Slovenia, the
northernmost republic in the Yugoslav Federation, Zizek was one of those who noticed that the regime
required its population to take a cynical distance from the claims it made about democracy in order for it
to function. This requirement meant that an enthusiastic embrace of democratic claims – in practices of
‘overidentification’ – might be able to open up and detonate the ideological apparatus from the inside. We
will look at strategies of resistance like this in more detail later, but for the moment we need to dismantle
the different aspects of the structurally- necessary symbolic deception that enabled the bureaucracy to
seize and hold power until it started to disintegrate in the 1980s.

You might also like