Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the BalkansAuthor(s): Dušan I. BjelićSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Summer, 2008), pp. 364-383Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652848 .Accessed: 10/09/2011 08:59

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Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans

Dusan I. Bjelic

If you want me to interpret, you are bound in my desire.

?Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader

In recent years, the field of exile studies has profoundly influenced west ern academic discourse, becoming foundational to the development of

the areas of postcolonial and cultural studies. Taking a psychoanalytic ap

proach to the question of exile, Julia Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves and

other works, has made a distinctive contribution to the field, and her

work is widely recognized as seminal to it.1 The purpose of this article is

to examine how her relationship to her native country, Bulgaria, and the

Balkans as a region has informed her work on exile, with the specific aim

of questioning some aspects of her construction of her own exilic identity and her psychoanalysis of the Balkans.

A prominent thesis in Kristeva's work is that being in exile, bearing the

psychic burden of the lost maternal space, is not only closely tied to the

process of Oedipal development but is also a site of dissent: "exile is al

ready in itself a form of dissidence, since it involves uprooting oneself from a family, a country, or language."2 She extends this concept of dissidence

to the idea of "Oedipal revolt" against the maternal space. While Edward

Said, Stuart Hall, Edward Soja, and other scholars affirm their respective maternal spaces as colonial and peripheral to the hegemony of the impe rial cultural center and call for cultural hybridity, Kristeva advocates Oedi

pal separation from the native space as if from the "archaic mother" and

rejects her Bulgarian identity on behalf of French cosmopolitanism. She

reformulates "resistance" as the revolt of the center against the periphery and views the west (France in particular) as the symbolic father and agent of civilizing "rescue" from the Balkans, Europe's unconscious source of

carnage and violence.3 Her message to Bulgarian citizens is "undergo a

psychoanalysis or psychotherapy" in order to join European civilization

Many thanks to Rosemary Miller for her help on this paper. Epigraph taken from Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York, 1986), 311.

1. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1994). For

the seminal nature of Kristeva's work, see Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Prin

ceton, 2001); Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: "The East" in European Identity Formation

(Minneapolis, 1999). 2. Kristeva, quoted in Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature

and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (Philadelphia, 1996), 195. 3. Kristeva asserts, "This is because, just as Lacan said the unconscious may perhaps

be structured like a language, I think that it is above all structured as a carnage." Julia Kris

teva, "Dialogue with Julia Kristeva," Parallax 4, no. 3 (1998): 6. Emphasis in the original.

Slavic Review 67', no. 2 (Summer 2008)

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 365

successfully.4 In short, Kristeva accepts the "point of view of the dominat

ing other" as the civilizational cure for the Balkans.5 In Kristeva's psychoanalytic register, one can only become an exile?

and identify oneself as such?by way of displacement from the maternal

space. Therefore, her discourse on the Balkans and on the state of exile

itself, with its strong autobiographical overtones, cannot be disassociated from her Balkan origins. In fact, I argue, by way of psychoanalytic me

diation, her construction of her own exilic identity replicates on an indi vidual level the continuous cycle of Europe's construction of the Balkans as the reciprocal component of its own self-invention. In calling for the Balkans' Oedipal revolt against "the Mother" and the affirmation of the

symbolic order, that is, the Law, the Father, she reveals the true discursive locus of her work, and her self-identity, in the geopolitics of Europe. As

historian Larry Wolff has demonstrated, the European space since Vol taire has been signified in its political unconscious as the masculine west, the space of reason and representation, and the feminine east, the space that lacks both.6

My point is that Kristeva deploys a familiar arsenal of geopolitical ste

reotypes to construct the psychological split from the Balkans that is cen tral to her project of Oedipal revolt and unquestioningly accepts the geo

political east/west split deeply ingrained in the discursive geography of the European Grossraum.1 When she, as a psychoanalyst, registers mater

nal space as the unconscious, which "is above all structured as a carnage,'" she incorporates into the structure of her Oedipal self not only Sigmund Freud's view of the Balkans as a regressed population, but also the logic of

European geopolitics.8 Kristeva, in her articulation of her exilic identity and of the state of "ex

ile" in general, relies solely on psychoanalytic constructions and ignores the important academic discourse on Balkan identity that has emerged

during the last two decades.9 Yet some of her critics have relied upon that

4. Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York,

2000), 182. 5. Rastko Mocnik, "The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms," in Dusan

I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation,

(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 95.

6. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the En

lightenment (Stanford, 1994). 7. See also Neumann, Uses of the Other.

8. A harbinger of balkanismwas Freud's letter to Trieste psychoanalyst Edoardo Weiss

(28 May 1992) regarding Weiss's Slovene patient who was not responsive to therapy. Freud

writes, "our analytical art when faced with such people, our perspicacity alone cannot

break through to the dynamic relation which controls them." Quoted in Slavoj Zizek, For

They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London, 1996), 8. Thus, Freud

asserted the essence of the Balkans' subjectivity precisely by declaring them unreachable

through the particular mythology of psychoanalysis. 9. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997); Vesna Goldsworthy, In

venting Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, 1998) ; Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996) ; Milica Bakic-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Re

view54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917-31.

366 Slavic Review

discourse, which focuses on the ambiguity and liminality of Balkan iden

tity, in their analysis of her work. Elka Agoston-Nikolova, for example,

argues that Kristeva's paradoxical position of being both in and out of the

Balkans/Europe epitomizes multicultural identity. Nikolova attributes

Kristeva's preoccupation with exile to the "geopolitical position of Bul

garia on the cross-roads of the Balkans."10 And, she argues, coming from

the "crossroads" of the Balkans, as does Kristeva, makes one open to "dis

placement and marginality" and puts one in an advantageous symbolic

position in today's globalized world. Yet Kristeva herself uses the "cross

roads" to dominate the Balkans from the center. For her, the crossroads, the mythical haunt of werewolves, signify, not the symbolic advantage of

the displaced, but presymbolic "monstrous intimacy": "I am a monster

of the crossroads."11 Bulgarian scholar Elena Gueorguieva points out that

in Kristeva's autobiographical 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 "wolflike," deeply steeped in murder

and crime, where "aggression remains the only counterweight to depres sion."12 But Giorgio Agamben invokes the werewolf as a metaphor for the

ancient Roman legal concept of homo sacer reduced by the sovereign's state

of exception to "bare life."13 So completely stripped of subjectivity by the

sovereign that it may not even be sacrificed, "bare life" lives in perpetual banishment, outside the law yet bound by it. In short, for Kristeva, the

Balkans and France do not meet as two subjects, two equal codes, but

rather as French subject and Bulgarian abject: "The abject has only one

quality of the object?that of being opposed to 7."14 Within her project of

Oedipal revolt, she pits Bulgaria as European archaic drive against France

10. Elka Agoston-Nikolova, "The World Is Vast (Bulgarian Exile Writers between Two

Cultures)," in Willem G. Weststeijn, ed., Dutch Contributions to the Twelfth International Con

gress ofSlavists (Amsterdam, 1999), 10.

11. Ibid., 3; Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 167.

12. Elena Gueorguieva, "Images de la Bulgarie dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Julia

Kristeva," Etudes balkaniques 2, no. 3 (2001): 215. (Excerpts quoted here have been trans

lated from the French by Rosemary Miller.) Gueorguieva's essay is useful in reminding us

that, although Kristeva's work was first published in France in 1969, "it is only since 1992

that a first translation into Bulgarian saw the light. . . . Since the fall of the Berlin wall,

interviews with Kristeva and the appearance of translations from extracts of her works have

multiplied in the Bulgarian press. Other books have been translated lately into Bulgarian,

notably The Old Man and the Wolves and Possessions, as well as an early work on psycho

analysis, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy. . . . Before that, only

an elite group of Bulgar ian intellectuals, those who knew foreign languages, had access to these works. Presently,

through the translations, Kristeva is being revealed to readers of her country of origin, not

only as a scholar of language, but also as a psychoanalyst and novelist" (215). Gueorguieva

also points out that references to Bulgaria in Kristeva's novels "disguised, blended, juxta

posed to other elements of this world, the names of places" (221), may, in some cases, be

recognizable only to Bulgarian readers.

13. "Rodolphe Jhering was, with these words, the first to approximate the figure of

homo sacer to that of the wargas, the wolf-man, and of the Friedlos, the 'man without peace' of ancient Germanic law." Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.

Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998), 104.

14. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New

York, 1982), 1.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 367

as Europe's symbolic and as a result she sacrifices psychological heteroge

neity to the simplified structure of geopolitical differentiation. In other

words, in the language of European geopolitics, the meaning of "archaic

mother" is quite different and more ossified than it is in a theory of poet ics; while the latter invents new usages of language, the former invokes

established stereotypes. To become a French subject, Kristeva had first to

demonize her Bulgarian identity according to her own theory of abjec tion: "I expel myself, I spit myselfbut, I abject myselfWithm the same motion

through which T claim to establish myself"15 From exile, she writes with

"love" to Bulgaria as the geopolitical abject: "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."16

Kristeva discursively weaves her personal history and exilic identity into this geopolitical complex in interesting, provocative ways. She left

her native Bulgaria in 1965 when, at age of 24, she received a scholar

ship from the French government that enabled her to pursue graduate studies in Paris. There she studied with such eminent scholars as Roland

Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Emil Benveniste, among others. As a

semiologist, psychoanalyst, and even a writer of fiction, she has gained world renown. Among the many accolades she has received over the years is a Doctor Honoris Causa degree from her Bulgarian alma mater, the Uni

versity of Sofia. In many respects, this event, which took place in May 2002, is emblematic of her career and her self-assigned exilic identity, not

only because it marked a triumphal return to her native Bulgaria, but also

because her acceptance speech touches upon the main themes of her

work and, while expressing gratitude for the education she received in

Bulgaria, specifically acknowledges her allegiance to France and her love

and admiration for the French culture and language.17 "I love the logical

clarity of French, the impeccable precision of the vocabulary, the niceness

of judgment. ... I have transferred so completely into this other language

that I have spoken and written for fifty years already that I am almost

ready to believe the Americans who take me for a French intellectual and

writer."18 Her love of the French language must have been immediately evident to her largely Bulgarian audience, because the speech was deliv ered in French, with a token passage in Bulgarian at the end.

That Kristeva's acceptance speech at University of Sofia was written

15. Ibid., 3. Emphasis in the original. 16. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 176.

17. Julia Kristeva, "La Langue, la nation, les femmes" (speech presented at University of Sofia, 2002). (Excerpts quoted in this article have been translated from the French by

Rosemary Miller.) Dimitar Kambourov, who was present when Kristeva received the Doctor

Honoris Causa degree and heard her speak, sent me a copy of her speech in the origi nal French. He reports, "I would say that people who know details concerning Kristeva's

intellectual itinerary would not be that surprised by the fact that she gave her speech in

French ... in fact, there was widespread opposition to what she did then." Kambourov, letter to author, 19 March 2007. Quoted by permission.

18. Ibid., 12-13.

368 Slavic Review

and delivered in French is perhaps not surprising, given the forty (or so)

years that had elapsed since she effectively stopped using Bulgarian .Yet

her predilection for all things French has deeper implications with regard to her personalized civilizational model, which is based on superiority rather than on diversity and in which she regards language as playing a

crucial role. This is particularly evident when she discusses the Bulgarian

language in the essay "Bulgarie, ma souffrance."19 In this essay Kristeva

describes a rare visit to her homeland in 1989, just before the fall of the

Berlin Wall, when she accompanied French President Fran?ois Mitterand

on an official visit. In psychoanalytic terms, she returns to Bulgaria as an

emancipated Oedipus with Mitterand as her symbolic father. And, in the

essay, all elements of her theory of language are put into play to produce an apology for the psychopolitical necessity of a divided Europe. Gazing

with her French eye, she finds three particularly disturbing and internally related irritants in Bulgaria?dirty streets, a dirty national language, and

Orthodox Christianity. The polluted streets and the polluted language are

symptomatic of social disorder and the lack of a genuine national iden

tity, and these are directly caused, in her judgment, by the failed Oedipal structure of the Orthodox Christian unconscious and Orthodox theolo

gy's feminization of the Orthodox Oedipus. As for the streets, Kristeva laments the postcommunist aesthetics of

the public sphere, the black markets, and "the garbage and flies" in the

streets of Sofia. Even more, she laments the "lapses of taste" revealed by the sorry condition of the national language. When Bulgarians began

translating William Shakespeare, Fedor Dostoevskii, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and

even a bit of Kristeva, "It became clear," Kristeva points out, "that there

were not enough words, and so they stuffed into this poor language of

sensitive peasants and na?ve thinkers a whole arsenal of tasteless and root

less loanwords."20 For her, vandalism, trashy consumer aesthetics, an il

legal economy, political corruption, and cultural plagiarism?common features of postcommunist societies?are all signs of barbarism and pre

empt any kind of social grace, politeness, and national taste. She divides

European nations into those, like France, that have an aesthetic of the

public sphere and those, like Bulgaria, that do not.

Kristeva elevates Oedipal cleanliness, the clear sign of the subject's internalization of the father's law and the separation from the mother, to a political and geoaesthetic precondition for the formation of a civic

nation characterized by distinct and collectively shared taste. For her, "na

tion" is not just a political institution, it is a psychoaesthetic aggregate like the Greek polis, in which politics, identity, and social life all stem

from a collective aesthetics predicated on the Oedipal hygienic. Building her psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity upon Hannah Arendt's "veritable

politics of narration," Kristeva theorizes that a nation is a political object

19. Julia Kristeva, "Bulgarie, ma souffrance," LInfini 51 (Autumn 1995): 42-52.

Translated as "Bulgaria, My Suffering," Crisis of the European Subject, 163-83.

20. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 171.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 369

of order only to the extent that it achieves an aesthetic unity among its

citizens?that it has a national "taste."21 France, of course, is the aesthetic

nation par excellence and the leading example of this principle. "French

taste," she writes, "is an act of politeness among people who share the same

rhetoric?the same accumulation of images and phrases," and although "each person belongs to his family, a clan of friends, a professional clique, that's anchored in language," people in clans share "the same battery of

readings and conversations," a commonality that is the mark of a "stable

society." French clannishness has been "rooted in language, in an art of

living and in this harmonization of shared customs called French taste."22

With respect to the art of living, Kristeva even claims that France should

be seen as the aesthetic leader of the world:

I lodge my body in the logical landscape of France, take shelter in the

sleek, easy and smiling streets, rub shoulders with this odd people?they are reserved but disabused and possessed of an impenetrable intimacy

which is, all things considered, polite. They built Notre-Dame and the

Louvre, conquered Europe and a large part of the globe, and then went

back home again because they prefer a pleasure that goes hand in hand with reality. But because they also prefer the pleasures reality affords,

they still believe themselves masters of the world, or at any rate a great

power. An irritated, condescending, fascinated world that seems ready to follow them. To follow us.23

Kristeva shares with Arendt the belief that through narrative?the net

work of speech?true interest in political action is engendered and the

polis may be self-regulated. Both view these conditions as indispensable to the preservation of civic societies and European democracy. The "gar

bage and flies" in the streets of Sofia and the polluted Bulgarian language

signify a lack of inter-esse (to use Martin Heidegger's term) among citizens

to act for the common good.24 Kristeva's judgment on the deteriorated state of the Bulgarian lan

guage is significant in light of her obvious civilizing mission with regard to Bulgaria. She even correlates the lack of national hygiene with the de

based condition of the national language. On the one hand, she claims

that narration provides the matrix for intersubjective understanding in

the polis-like-democracy in which subjects can and should speak polylogi cally, openly negotiate their emotions and pleasures. On the other hand, she discloses that "Bulgarian is an almost dead language for me . . . exile

cadaverized this old body and substituted it with another . . . now the only

living one: French."25 But this admission only leads one to question just how qualified she is to render judgment upon the state of the Bulgarian

language.

21. Ibid., 57.

22. Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O'Keeffe, ed. Sylv?re Lotringer (Los

Angeles, 2002), 49.

23. Ibid., 65.

24. For an analysis of "inter-esse," see Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 11,

52, 54.

25. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York, 2002), 243.

370 Slavic Review

Tzvetan Todorov, renowned as a historian and literary theorist, is a

compatriot of Kristeva's and a fellow ?migr? in Paris, and there are many other circumstantial similarities in their backgrounds. Approximately the

same age, both attended French-speaking schools in their native Bulgaria, went to Paris to pursue graduate studies in the 1960s, and were associated

with the same intellectual circle during their early years there. After an

absence of eighteen years, Todorov first returned to Bulgaria in 1981 as

part of the French delegation to a celebration of the 1300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state. He writes of this experience in

the essay "Roundtrip Ticket."26 It is interesting and enlightening to com

pare his essay with Kristeva's reactions to her own return, articulated in

"Bulgaria, My Suffering." Todorov, in contrast to Kristeva, has no political,

philosophical, or linguistic axe to grind. Though he returns to Bulgaria in a semiofficial capacity, his experience is modestly presented through the details of everyday life. For instance, he cleans his parents' yard wear

ing a pair of old shoes that his mother has kept in a drawer for eighteen

years. His essay is a thoughtful examination, touched with humor, of the

"existential difficulty" of exile and displacement.27 Though he admits to

"hostility" toward the communist regime, he does not conflate politics with interpersonal relations or with culture. The question of language is

of concern to him, as it is to Kristeva. Yet his perspective is not at all critical; he is concerned with communication. He first writes his address for the

conference to which he has been invited in French, then translates it into

Bulgarian, concerned throughout with not offending his hosts through an inadvertent linguistic faux pas. Todorov's thoughtful examination of

questions of exile, language, and cultural identity leads him to conclude, "I cannot debate these questions as an impartial judge because my per sonal fate has forcibly imposed my way of seeing; but I can try to convey the sense of my experience."28 The sense of his experience is very differ

ent from that of Kristeva's own return, which is completely self-referential,

suffusing "experience" with politics, ideology, and above all psychoanalyti

cally based judgments.

"Bulgarie, ma souffrance," is, in a word, controversial?as is most of

Kristeva's work. From Sofia, Kambourov writes, "As for ["Bulgarie, ma

souffrance"], it was sweepingly criticised in the beginning of the 90s when

it first appeared in several forums I have attended; I don't believe Kristeva

was ever interested in what we've been thinking about her here, in Bul

garia: she is so proud to be a French intellectual and writer that the less she

knows about her former culture the easier the task of self-fulfilment ap

26. "Aller retour" in Tzvetan Todorov, L'Homme d?pays? (Paris, 1996), 11-26. (Ex

cerpts quoted in this article have been translated from the French by Rosemary Miller.)

27. Todorov's essay makes clear just how cut off he (and doubtless Kristeva as well) were from Bulgaria after leaving there in the 1960s. He writes, "The circumstances were

thus: the length of my absence; the completeness of the rupture during those years ... ;

news traveled with difficulty between Sofia and Paris, hindered by the iron curtain; and

the disconnectedness between those two places was actually greater than between Paris

and San Francisco." Ibid., 13.

28. Ibid., 21.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 371

pears to be."29 Controversial as it is, her work has polarized critics. Gayatri

Spivak, writing from her own perspective as an exile, is one of Kristeva's

detractors: "I'm repelled by Kristeva's politics: what seems to me to be

her reliance on a sort of banal historical narrative . . . Christianizing psy

choanalysis . . . ferocious Western Eurocentrism."30 James Penney, at the

other end of the critical spectrum, considers her controversial position a

challenge to the ideological. Through psychoanalysis, in Penney's view, Kristeva reduces the impact of ideology upon the subject's behavior, thus

radicalizing "the classical split between the public democratic participa tion and private enjoyment" and placing the emphasis on "a fragmented social body divided among political, social, and private domains."31 "In so

doing," he concludes, "she provides an outlet for all forms of affect and

passion outside the boundaries of the political machine through literary and cultural creation."32

Bulgarian scholar and feminist writer Miglena Nikolchina is one of

those critics who are sensitive to the question of place and the relevance

of "discursive geography" to an understanding of Kristeva. In her book on Kristeva, Nikolchina omits any direct reference to the political im

plications of Kristeva's texts, yet she introduces political geography into her discussion of Kristeva as central to understanding her as the Balkan

woman in exile.

Above I outlined the contradictions between [Kaja] Silverman (uncon scious desire) and [Alice] Jardine (calculated political strategy), Spivak (not a shadow of the past) and [Jane] Gallop (flaunting marginality) in the discussion of Kristeva. The very disparity of these views suggests that the voice of marginality tends to be perceived

as an oscillation be

tween the inaudible and the vulgar. We always seem to have too much

(the vulgar Bulgar) or too little (the hegemonic Parisian) of the mar

ginal; in either case, we cannot quite hear it.33

For Nikolchina, the multiple significations and the absence of a

defined center in Kristeva's work are the true markers of her sexual

geographic marginality. (Hence, the critics cannot decide whether Kristeva is a vulgar Bulgarian or a Parisian elitist; she is both and neither.) Kriste

va's quest for the lost "maternal space" inside the symbolic geography is

exactly the source of her dynamic poly logy, according to Nikolchina. There simmers the silent joy of a "hidden map" of the lost and found "maternal

space."34 Taking into account her critics' widely varying views, we should

29. Kambourov adds, "On the other hand, we are so deeply disappointed by the way this culture has developed along the recent two decades that our lamentations and de

ploring attitudes sometimes go way further." Kambourov, letter to author, 19 March 2007.

Quoted with permission. 30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London, 1993), 17.

31. James Penney, "Uncanny Foreigners: Does the Subaltern Speak through Julia Kristeva?" in Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York, 1998), 126, 133.

32. Ibid., 133.

33. Miglena Nikolchina, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (New York, 2004), 60.

34. Ibid.

372 Slavic Review

carefully examine Kristeva's conceptual apparatus to see if she indeed

provides the nonideological space where subjectivity is dynamically and

heterogeneously conceptualized or if she presents the old imperial dis course in a new guise, as Spivak claims.

Kristeva's important contributions to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and

phenomenology are well documented, but her work may also be seen as

a "hidden map" of her identity. Her concept of "exile" as a state of cos

mopolitanism originates not so much from her life in Paris as from her

experience of herself as a liberated, fully psychoanalyzed subject exiled

from her maternal space of birth. Alone in France as a foreigner, expe

riencing a foreign culture and language, she theorized this experience of foreignness as "the Other" in us?that is, of people in exile like her

self who commit psychological "matricide," separating from the maternal

space and language in order to join the symbolic universe of the paternal civilization. Like "exile" and "the Other," Kristeva's concept of "abject" has its basis in the Oedipal scene.35 That which is neither object nor sub

ject, that which lacks a place in the symbolic order, that place where the

distinction breaks down between self and other must be "abject" in order

for the subject to maintain its own place in the symbolic order. "Abject"

represents both the threat of a breakdown of meaning and the reaction to

such a breakdown. The father represents the symbolic order, the necessi

ties of life, and the law as cleanliness. The abject designates the maternal

space, ambiguities, inbetweenness, and the absence of commitment and

trust that are essential to the law. The abject bears a symbolic taint, the

remnant of the prerational and prelingual unity with the mother.

The "chora" is an important theoretical concept that Kristeva has

adapted from Plato's Timaeus, where he conceptualizes the formless re

ceptacle of the mother's body that gives birth to the reason that brings form to life.36 She theorizes "chora" as the signifier of the primal desire

for unity with the mother against which the subject must struggle in order

to acquire language and enter the symbolic space. The separation from

the maternal space is not absolute. Rather, the subject exists in the tension

between the joy of speech (desire for the father) and the seduction of the

prelingual state of maternal unity (desire for the mother). The subject's

unique voice emerges from that tension. Here, once again, she is con

structing subjectivity on two levels, language and geography, and as a state

of permanent tension rather than a stable center. She theorizes language as an energetic field created by the opposing forces of Eros and Thanatos.

In and through the tension created by these opposing forces, she be

lieves, the subject is constituted both as desiring subject and autonomous

speaker. But the energetic field of language acquisition is as dangerous as

it is liberating, with Thanatos (the death instinct) and Eros (the maternal

erotic instinct) vying for dominance within it. The Oedipus, struggling for

survival in this dangerous field, wins out when castration anxiety and fear

35. Kristeva, Powers of Horror; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Mar

garet Waller (New York, 1984). 36. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 373

of the father cause the Oedipus (male and female) to relinquish erotic attachment to the mother. Kristeva offers her own displacement and exile as a biographical template for this liberatory process. The geopolitical contingencies separating her from her maternal space work here as the

agency of civilizing law. She even sees her exile as a form of personal salva tion and imagines her divine "task" as a mission to spread the gospel of the

paternal law in the Balkans: "Yet by relying precisely on this debt toward the father, I will try to speak of other debts, particularly vis-?-vis the 'dark

continent,' the maternal continent."37

Kristeva represents her relation to her maternal space as dynamic and

heterogeneous and proceeds in her politics of psychoanalysis to incorpo rate geopolitical logic into the logic of the desiring subject. Through her feminine body and the experience of giving birth, she remembers her "archaic mother," "maternal memory ... a body within my body."38 Echo

ing Freud's argument that "the permanence and quality of maternal love

pave the way for the earliest spatial references," she infuses this intimate

memory with geopolitical signifiers and figuratively merges her body with the geopolitical map of Europe's Grossraum.39 Yet, the "somber Balkans" causes her, the subject-in-process, to be in conflict with the geopoliti cal chora, the subject-in-geopolitical-process. The attempt to bond with

chora, is, on the one hand, the cause of today's "maladies of the soul": "Borderline personalities and certain aspects of depression," Kristeva pos its, "may be described based on this psychical economy, which also refers to the archaic relationship of nonseparation with the maternal container: the mother being the primary abject."40 On the other hand, the bond can never be completely severed and, indeed, for the speaking subject to find the truth about himself or herself as the "desiring subject" some connection must be maintained. Yet this dynamic model ceases and a static hierarchical structure emerges when Kristeva's personal psychology recapitulates the geopolitics of the region in her identifying of maternal

space. She designates the west the geopolitical analogue of her mind, and the Balkans the analogue of her own body and drives, "a blank spot on the

geographical map, somber Balkans pierced through by a lack of curiosity about the West, where I am."41

Defining "unconscious," in general, and the Balkans, in particular, both as the foundation and the refusal of the subject, "the improper facet of the proper self," Kristeva politicizes Oedipal subjectivity and constructs the Balkans' danger.42 The split from the mother engenders the desiring subject, and Kristeva's constitution of her own exilic identity epitomizes this process. That is, she denounces the Balkans only to create a prohib

37. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York,

2000), 68. 38. Ibid., 245.

39. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York,

1995), 204. 40. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 260.

41. Ibid., 245.

42. Sara Beardsworth,/i?/?# Kristeva: Psychonalysis and Modernity (Albany, 2004), 189.

374 Slavic Review

ited desire for the place in order to dominate it symbolically. Kristeva

registers this prohibited desire, the precondition for the Oedipal subjec

tivity, as the madness of the subject and the only truth about the subject. Like Plato, she ties truth to desire; unlike Plato she ties it to the maternal

space. Just as desire for chora obstructs meaning and subjectivity, and neither is possible without it, so the danger and truth about her are to be found in the prohibited Balkans. She adopts the Lacanian view that signi

fying an object always leaves a part of it that resists meaning?that is "un

representable"?this is the Lacanian Real (not the same as reality) and is

analogous to chora, and it engenders the desire to know that which is "un

nameable," which is the desire itself.43 The "unnameable" is the "umbili cal" chord attached to the prelingual maternal space?the unconscious desire for the mother that resists representation and meaning. When the

object of knowledge enters the symbolic, it fuses with the Real, the mater

nal negativity. The desire for the "unnameable" remains attached to the

nameable, making the object nothing other than the Oedipus' desire. In

the form of the "unnameable" primal phantasm, the mother operates be

hind and between words as Heideggerian Sachverhalt. The speaking sub

ject sublimates this primal phantasm into the desire for knowledge, which

"the analyst can sight and hear," enabling the analysand to recognize "the

archaic mother who is resistant to meaning."44 And, for the psychoanalyst, this vertigo (the "interpretative delirium") is, nevertheless, "a means of

protecting us from a masochistic and jubilatory fall into nature, into the

full and pagan mother, a fall which is a tempting and crushing enigma for anyone who has not gained some distance from it with the help of an

interpretative device."45

The analytically generated state of delirium enables the subject to con

front the danger of unconscious desire for the "maternal space." This

dangerous space of maternal madness has to be redirected from the fa

ther and the symbolic order toward the mother. If not analytically inter

preted, the Oedipus may be engulfed by the mother. If the subject is psy

choanalyzed and desire made transparent, the ensuing delirium may help the Oedipus to recognize the death struggle in which it is engaged. Thus,

Kristeva believes, an analytic position acquires counterweight that makes

delirium work on behalf of analytic truth, and the delirious subject open to interpretation is already positioned and structured for psychoanaly sis. Unlike "classical" interpretation, where theory restricts the range of

delirium by tethering it to preconceptions, psychoanalytic interpretation actually explores delirium in order to expand its interpretative capacity.

Oedipal discourse is present here not as a fixed neutralizer?a straitjacket for delirium?but as a living, active coordination between the analytical

exploration and expansion of delirium and the analyst's countertransfer ence. Interpretation, Kristeva tells us, should have a shamanistic effect

43. Samir Dayal, "Introduction," in Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 4L

44. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ?d. Toril Moi (New York, 1986) ,310,11. 45. Ibid., 314.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 375

upon the subject in which the reconstruction of the symbolic leads the

Oedipus to connect with repressed desire. She elaborates: "Like a de

lirious subject, the psychoanalyst builds, by way of interpretation, a con

struction, which is true only if it triggers other associations on the part of

the analysand, thus expanding the boundaries of the analyzable. In other

words, this analytic interpretation is only, in the best of cases, partially true, and its truth, even though it operates with the past, is demonstrable only

by its effects in the present."^

Analytic interpretation brings the subject from "partial truth" to the

mother by means of explorative delirium and calls upon the subject to

resist and overcome the blockage of the maternal in order to achieve awareness of the Oedipal dialectics. Simply put, the subject comes to un

derstand that a precondition for becoming a competent speaker is the

resolution of the Oedipal conflict. And, according to Kristeva, failure to

maintain the maternal separation may render the delirious subject vulner

able to manipulation by demagogues seeking to establish political power

by exploiting unconscious desire. Failure to achieve and maintain separa tion from the maternal space becomes then, by definition, an obstacle to

establishing "intimate" democracy, and the Balkans is her case in point of

failed civic intimacy resulting from lack of Oedipal reconstruction.

Specifically, Kristeva extends her theory of the desiring Oedipus into

political discourse through the situating of language in the Oedipal scene.

That is, she views democracy as a universal space where speaking subjects announce themselves and relate to equivalent others as intimate signi fiers. And since, in her register, the Oedipal separation from the mother is fundamental to intimacy and representation, it thus becomes pivotal

not only to the formation of the subject but to the viability of (intimate)

democracy per se. It is with this logic that she justifies her theoretical leap from language to politics, addressing the political as a potential oppressor of intimacy that works by blocking the subject's connection with uncon

scious desire. She defines the project of Oedipal revolt as working against this blockage and thus for the life of desire that is endangered in any form

of social revolution that fails to place the desiring subject and its rejection of the maternal at the center of its effort?or to demand a reverence for

the law. It is precisely from this theoretical vantage point that she calls for

Oedipal revolt in the Balkans.

Asking rhetorically, "When did God die in the Balkans?" Kristeva pon ders the role of Orthodox Christianity in the Bulgarian disorderliness, the

dangerous geography.47 She concludes that Orthodoxy, because it fails to provide a proper symbolic order, is responsible for the rise of "tribal"

nationalism in eastern Europe and the Balkans. This proclivity to trib

alism and violence in Orthodox subjectivity?rendering it particularly

problematic with respect to the unification of Europe?originates in the

weak symbolic authority of the father in Orthodoxy. This weak symbolic

46. Ibid., 309. Emphasis in the original. 47. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 176.

376 Slavic Review

authority of the father (the law) results in a lack of the discipline that must

underpin democracy, cleanliness, and good taste.48 Freud's theory of sexuality and sexualized subjectivity is central to

Kristeva's analysis of the Orthodox psyche just as it is to her geopoliti cal analysis of the Balkans. She constructs her analysis of the Orthodox

psyche as follows: the product of an archaic religious dogma and a failed

Oedipal self, the Orthodox psyche stands in opposition to the western

Christian self. Western Christianity stems from the paternal authority of Augustinian interrogation, has a theory of God, a distinct narrative

tradition, and emphasizes ratiocination, positive freedom, and social re

sponsibility. Orthodox Christianity emphasizes the feminine "theology of

experience," a preconceptual, prenarrative relation to God that leads to a mystical excommunication from social affairs and to a lack of moral re

sponsibility. In that sense Orthodox subjectivity as a feminine psyche is by definition archaic. Western Christianity is rational; Orthodox Christianity is emotional. To further elucidate her position, Kristeva offers this psycho

analytic interpretation of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox interpreta tions of the Holy Trinity:

God is threefold in Orthodoxy, but not in the same way as in Catholi cism: the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son for the

Orthodox (perfilium) ; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son for the Catholics (filioque). While this "and" puts Father and Son on an equal footing and prefigures the autonomy and independence of the person (that of the Son, as well as that of the Believer, which

opens the way to Western individualism and personalism), the Orthodox

"through" suggests a delicious deadly annihilation of the Son and of the believer.49

Since God the Father reigns as the omnipotent authority and the Son

is subservient to him as a conduit of the Holy Spirit rather than a source

of it, a paradox is created in which the Son is subordinate and godlike at

the same time. With such a conception of the Son, the believer is caught in this same paradox of submission to and exaltation of the Father. As a

result of failed theology, the joy and sorrow intrinsic to the master-slave

dialectic form, as Kristeva concludes on a more personal level, a latent

male homosexuality and feminization, as well as a masculinization of the

female.50 Ultimately, then, for Kristeva, the pathology of Orthodox sub

jectivity rests in producing "reverse repression," fear of castration, and

violence against the father?all of which represent the return to the ar

chaic mother. In brief, the problem with the failing Orthodox Oedipus is

feminization and the danger of becoming maternal.

48. Yet she praises her father Stoyan Kristev, "the orthodox intellectual who pushed

byzantinism, up to the point of making me learn French from a very early age, in order to

transmit to me the spirit of inquiry and freedom with which French culture is endowed."

Kristeva, "La Langue, la nation, les femmes," 3.

49. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 38-39.

50. The believer is thus "caught in an exquisite logic of submission and exaltation

that offers him the joys and sorrows intrinsic to the master-slave dialectic and, on a more

personal level, to male homosexuality." Ibid., 139.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 377

A corollary to Kristeva's psychoanalytic construction of Orthodoxy is that the way out of the Orthodox feminization and violence is not through the simple ejection of the maternal but through her subjugation to the

symbolic order of "the dominating other." Splitting the maternal space is the first step toward this subjugation that should open the archaic mother for purification inside the sacred space signified by religion as sacrifice, "the elimination of taint, and protection against the maternal are at the

heart of the constitution of the sacred."51 Thus Kristeva's (and, by exten

sion, the Balkans') task is to remove the intrinsic taint of the maternal and restore the maternal to the space of purity. This is where the Orthodox

woman cannot go, given the lack of a symbolic order that will permit her to find her own place in that order by killing the primal Mother and re

connecting with her in language. Because of the improper symbolic order in Orthodox Christianity, the

Balkan subject does not fit the civilizing scheme of the "sacred contract" between the genders. In Totem and Taboo, Freud theorizes that religion is founded on the need for expiation of the guilt that inheres in the collec tive memory because of the killing of the primal father. As such, religion

binds men and women in an intimate social contract that seeks to avoid murder and violence. It is of paramount importance for the woman to up hold her share of the contract by loving the father. Orthodox Christianity is one form of this collective memory; yet its adherents cannot uphold the social contract because its symbolic structure fails to discourage violence and murder. "If society is truly founded on a communal murder," Kristeva

argues, "the realization that castration provides the basis for the sociosym bolic is what will enable human beings to postpone murder. We symbolize

murder (and ourselves), and thus have an opportunity to transform bale ful chaos into an optimal sociosymbolic order."52 A supporting player in the sacrificial drama, the Oedipalized woman, is the true conductor pre

cisely because she has accepted castration for the sake of peace and order.

Anything short ofthat acceptance leads to chaos and violence?that is, to the Balkanization of life. According to this logic, everything that applies to a woman should apply to the Balkans.

Today's women have proclaimed that this sacrificial contract imposes it self against their will, which has compelled them to attempt a revolt that

they perceive to be a resurrection. Society as a whole, however, considers

this revolt to be a refusal and it can result in violence between the sexes

(a murderous hatred, the break-up of the couple and the family) or in cultural innovation. In fact, it probably leads to them both. In any event,

that is where the stakes are, and they are of enormous consequence. By

fighting against evil, we reproduce it, this time at the core of the social

bond between men and women.53

Analytic interpretation aiming to take the delirious subject to the edge of the maternal space is, by definition, a geopolitical operation in that it

51. Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 21.

52. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 214.

53. Ibid.

378 Slavic Review

individualizes the sense of Oedipal conflict through geopolitical tensions

between the symbolic France and the constructed danger of the Balkans.

In the case of Kristeva's own analytic delirium one finds just that. In order to encounter her maternal space and indwelling maternal madness by

way of personal transformation in the course of analysis, she has to arrive at the signifiers "Bulgaria" (the "blank spot") and "France" (the father

who mandates the mapping of "Bulgaria" as "a blank spot"), both as per sonal and geopolitical signifiers of her identity. Thus "Bulgaria" invokes

for Kristeva both the analytical and geopolitical maternal madness of car

nage and murder. At the very moment of her geopolitical emancipation, when she designates "France" her symbolic father, the master signifier

"Bulgaria" becomes the "archaic mother." And it is precisely in this geo

political therapeutic location that her femininity acquires its signification as both sexual and political negativity.

Her loyalty to the "special mission" of the culture and political system of her adoptive country becomes an essential component of her negativ

ity toward the "blissful anarchy" of the feminine. Inclined to the political left when she arrived in France in 1965, two years later Kristeva joined the movement that led to the downfall of Charles de Gaulle. Years later, after her psychoanalytic training with Jacques Lacan, she regretted taking part in this uprising. In retrospect, she mourns the fallen father: "Neither

F?hrer, nor Communist Generalissimo, nor Pope, de Gaulle was simply a

Catholic general unlike any other."54 And, like a good and strong father

caring for his family, "[In de Gaulle] you have a President who is conceiver and strategist of the national discourse, who creates realities by means of

symbols while avoiding the pitfalls of tyranny and modifying circumstances

for the good of an increasing enlarged community, having in mind the

interests of its members."55 As a seasoned psychoanalyst reflecting on the

student uprisings of 1968, she sees the revolutionary scene in Paris as a fall

into primal crime such as that described by Freud?with de Gaulle as an

imaginative Catholic father leading and uniting the nation with the power of the symbol against whom the sons rebelled, filling the void of the social

symbolic with political demagogy.

Impelled by the symbolic gravity of the danger of the maternal space and the need to guard the law of the father, Kristeva's trajectory toward

political conservatism has continued, revealing certain paradoxical as

pects of her self-declared, center-to-periphery dissidence. For instance,

given her own exilic status, from within which she speaks as a self-analyzed immigrant, one might have expected her to empathize with the collective

plight of immigrants and to speak on their behalf against social injustice. Or, when she calls upon the Balkans to mount an Oedipal revolt against the authoritarian Orthodox father who has plunged the Balkans into eth

nic violence, one might assume that she is against political violence. But this is not so?in either case. The call to resistance is actually a conserva

tive call for loyalty to the social authority and for acquiescence to orga

54. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York,

1993), 69. 55. Ibid., 75.

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 379

nized state violence against the failed Oedipus, as evidenced by her public

support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombing of Slobodan

Milosevic's Yugoslavia and her implicit support of the expulsion of illegal

immigrants from France who fail to assimilate.

Given her loyalty to social authority, it is questionable whether her

notion that displacement and exile are the necessary preconditions for

"cosmopolitanism" (the opposite of balkanism) is sustainable. Although distant in space, French immigrants and the Balkans are, in Kristeva's reg ister, related within the discursive framework of her exilic identity. While

the Balkans symbolize the mad, archaic mother, the immigrants are an

gry children, and both are equally dangerous to the father. In fact, using the same language of Oedipalization with which she abjects the Balkans,

Kristeva accuses Third World immigrants in France, of "Balkanizing the

cultural, political, and economic forces of European people."56 Indeed, she blames immigrants for the "gruesome course" that French civil soci

ety has taken since the French Revolution. In 1990, many French intel lectuals signed a petition in favor of granting political asylum to illegal immigrants. Refusing to do so, Kristeva stated, "Much as I am sensitive to the distress of the immigrants, equally I don't think it's desirable to

give the deceptive impression that integration is possible for everyone who asks for it."57 She justifies her position by Oedipalizing the issue of

immigration. Immigrants are those who are marked (like her) with "ma

tricide," who have left their maternal countries and languages, and who can become fully integrated into French culture and society only if they accept French symbolic authority as their geopolitical father. Integration is possible and permitted only to the Oedipalized. Otherwise the immi

grants would, like the failed Oedipus, drown in the maternal "swamp" that will foster a breakdown of French symbolic authority and balkanize the French civic space. (Of course she would not expect French culture to be

open to the transformation she demands of immigrants.) In formulating her project of Oedipal revolt for the reconstruction of

postcommunist Balkan subjectivity, Kristeva does not take into account

any of the groundbreaking work on Balkan subjectivity that has emerged in recent years. Bulgarian-American historian Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans, which articulates the concept of balkanism (an extension of

Said's orientalism) is a case in point. The Balkans have always been part of the European nation-state imaginary, part of its history of rationality and of subjectivity, or, to be more precise, part of the history of Europe's self-splitting. The representation of the Balkans thus becomes an exten

sion of this history and also becomes internalized into the Balkans' self

identity. When Todorova named this process of representation balkanism, she included two contradictory elements in one: the Balkans as an object

explained by rational knowledge, and the Balkans as a space abandoned

by rational knowledge.58

Although Kristeva does not consider Todorova's or other new work

56. Ibid., 54.

57. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 46.

58. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.

380 Slavic Review

in Balkan studies in her own analysis, her representation of Balkan sub

jectivity is a prime example of the tenets of balkanism. For instance, Slo vene political philosopher Rastko Mocnik fully accounts for the status

and function of balkanism within the context of globalization. Two major a priori structures of domination and subordination govern balkanism as

politics and as identity: the first is horizontal antagonism between the Bal

kan ethnies, in which each 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, stereotypes of

Balkan character emerge as "knowledge" and as identities. The Balkan

identity becomes complete only when the geopolitical map has been

fully inscribed and reflected as an ambiguous and incomplete self and

as such is a supplement to global ideology in its very archaic closeness.

Kristeva's Oedipal revolt naturalizes both aspects of this scheme proposed

by Mocnik: horizontal antagonism in relationship to the Balkans as the

primitive other, as maternal space, and as abjected dangerous neighbor, and vertical cooperation with the established geopolitical hierarchy (for

example, France as symbolic master). She presupposes not only the in

completeness of Balkan subjectivity, but also the need to end it, asking the Balkans to subjugate themselves to the European symbolic authority

through psychoanalysis. She wants to end the Balkans' ambiguity, liminal

ity, and inbetweenness precisely because it is feminizing and thus patho

logical. She has achieved this for herself through an internal split between

the west and the east. Such a gesture of civilizing masculinity paradoxically balkanizes her own position. As with "nesting orientalisms," a common

feature of Balkan parochialism in which I find what is east of me as a way to assert my west, Kristeva is bound to find who is east of her in order to

define herself as civilized.59

Bosnian philosopher Ugo Vlaisavljevic argues that small Balkan eth

nies may be characterized by the closeness of their symbolic space and

may work to protect their "little traditions," which serve as a frame of ref

erence for establishing the reality of the nation.60 Their parochialism re

sults from defending their ethnic reality. This is a worldview that Kristeva

rejects, instead insisting on her identity as a "cosmopolitan intellectual

of European citizenship, French nationality, and Bulgarian origin."61 Yet

her very insistence on her own cosmopolitanism, and the terms in which

she defines it, blurs the line between the parochialism she rejects and the

cosmopolitanism she claims for herself and sees as the ideal for a fully

Oedipalized European "federation of strangers."62 In fact, when she won

59. Here I refer to Bakic-Hayden's notion of "nesting orientalisms" as specific self

colonizing discursive processes according to which the Balkan subjects internalize the

east-west geopolitical split and then act upon each other in terms of these sch?mas. Bakic

Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms."

60. Ugo Vlaisavljevic, "South Slav Identity and the Ultimate War-Reality," in Dusan

I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation

(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 191-207.

61. Kristeva, "La Langue, la nation, les femmes," 4.

62. And, John Mowitt reminds us, despite her dedication to psychoanalysis

as the

"talking cure" for today's "maladies of the soul," she excludes from this form of Oedipal

redemption, the entire population of Arabic-speaking immigrants whose language she,

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 381

ders about the anger of "these young people in French suburbs [French

Algerians] " who "have a need to express their unhappiness," she is repro

ducing the provincialism of the Balkan ethnies under the sign of Parisian

psychoanalysis.63 Another difficulty with Kristeva's attempt to elucidate Balkan subjec

tivity through psychoanalysis is that her use of such terms as archaic and

primitive in articulating her theory of the abject, which is central to her

concept of "sacred," lends racial overtones to her discourse when applied

geopolitically. According to Celia Brickman, "'primitive' is the key to

the racial economy of psychoanalysis, the watchword of a psychologizing discourse behind which is concealed an ideology of race."64 For Brick

man, Freud's articulation of "primitivity" emphasizes "the supreme self

confidence of European self-understanding," affirming "the universality of the psyche at the same time as it remained the racially indexed term

of derogation enlisted to discredit the pretensions of civilization."65 By

stressing the civilizing superiority of her French identity, Kristeva incorpo rates these inherent exclusionary aspects of psychoanalysis in her project of Oedipal revolt; she fails to elucidate Balkan subjectivity in its own right and denies the possibility of having dialogical relation with the Balkans.66

What she does, in fact, is to produce yet another hegemonic representa tion of the Balkans, while appearing to believe that she follows Bakhtinian

principles of heterogeneity and dialogism to envision, through psycho

analysis, the "subject as a dynamic of rebirth and creation."67

In fact, both Kristeva and her compatriot Todorov were early adher

ents of Mikhail Bakhtin and were instrumental in bringing his work to

the attention of the west.68 In the first chapter of his book The Morals of

History?about how an advanced culture, Catholic Spain, used the sym bolic system to colonize the natives of South America?Todorov, discuss

the therapist, does not speak. John Mowitt, "Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the

Talking Cure," Parallax 4, no. 3 (1998): 56.

63. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 106.

64. Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psycho

analysis (New York, 2003), 5.

65. Ibid.

66. M. Pierette Malcuzynski specifically refutes the heterogeneity, in the Bakhtin

ian sense, of Kristeva's work: "A Bakhtinian understanding of heterogeneity should also

be distinguished from Julia Kristeva's discussion of the 'heterogeneous.' She postulates a

(neo) Freudian interpretation of the subject's revolutionary struggle, whereby the subject's discourse should be heard together with the 'heterogeneous contradiction' suspended

by the Marxist subject. ... In my view, Kristeva operates a Freudo-Marxist syncretism

which, still grounded in Freud's instinct or drive theory ( Trieb) yet again presupposes a

hierarchy with an all-powerful producing subject ruling its originating summit, a subject which calls itself T (moi). This particular representation of the 'heterogeneous' prob

lem has little to do with the constitutive heterogeneity referred to in Bakhtin's writing by means of the polyphonic:

a practice of ?Miierarchization where the producing subject is

itself understood as the product of dialogized instances with other socio-cultural subjects." M. Pierrette Malcuzynski, "Mikhail Bakhtin and the Sociocritical Practice," in Robert F.

Barsky and Michael Holquist, eds., Bakhtin and Otherness, special issue of Social Discourse:

Research Papers in Comparative Literature, vol. 3, nos. 1-2 (1990): 89.

67. Kristeva, "La Langue, la nation, les femmes," 8-9.

68. Todorov is the author of a text widely viewed as the definitive work on Bakhtin:

Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis, 1984).

382 Slavic Review

ing the Bakhtinian concept of exotopy explains it as "nonbelonging to a

given culture." And, he writes further, "According to Bakhtin, not only is exotopy not an obstacle to thorough knowledge of this culture, it is the

necessary condition of it."69 He goes on to quote Bakhtin: "It is only in

the eye of an other culture, that the alien culture reveals itself more com

pletely and more deeply."70 In other words, in order to be illuminated, a

culture needs to be dialogically in relation to "other" cultures rather than

to abject them.

Kristeva substitutes the Lacanian split, fragmentation of the self, for

dialogue with the other. For her, there is only the Oedipal split between

the Balkan morbid abject and the French imperial symbol. For Todorov, the concept of "primitive" only signifies the relation of power; for Kristeva, it is a regressed stage of European civilization localized in the Balkans.

Colonial and Christian exaltation, not exotopy, is what Kristeva expresses, when she writes, "I am almost prepared to believe in the myth of resurrec

tion when I examine the divided state of my mind and body."71

Perhaps in part because Kristeva herself is an ?migr?, her discourse on exile has been widely interpreted as advocating cultural pluralism, whereas it actually presents an elaborate, normative rationale for cultural

homogeneity and ethnic and racial exclusionism. Though she frames her

discourse in psychoanalytic theory, it also strongly bears the earmarks of

European discursive geography (as does psychoanalysis itself). In Kriste

va's psychoanalytic scheme, France operates as the Lacanian Symbolic, the

formative matrix of the Oedipalization that enables foreigners to become

complete subjects and to assimilate into French culture. According to

Kristeva, the precondition for Oedipalization is the ability to confront un

conscious desire for the maternal space and recognize its danger, just as

she herself had to do in her self-proclaimed Oedipal transformation from

incomplete subject to French psychoanalyst. Undergoing psychoanalysis in Paris led Kristeva to identify her own Bulgarian origins as pathological.

As analysand, she then moved from seeing herself as the "other" in the

host country to seeing herself as the host?"the dominating other." Over

time, identification with the "host" came to dominate her subject position, and this perspective was reinforced by her role as psychoanalyst.

Not surprisingly, foreigners under her therapy have exhibited the same

psychic structure of matricide as she and are thus equally pathologized. Her clinical notes read, "changing language often doesn't just respond

to a political urgency, but is the sign of a matricide that no satisfactory relation with the Father could prevent or compensate for."72 In essence, she defines exile as pathology, writing "exile often harbors a trauma that's

difficult to confront and elaborate on: it predisposes these patients to

acting-out that runs from cynicism to corruption, defiance to fundamen

69. Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History, trans. Alyson Waters (Minneapolis, 1995), 4. Emphasis in the original.

70. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 71. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 243.

72. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 79

Julia Kristeva: Exile and Geopolitics of the Balkans 383

talism."73 Kristeva's designation of the Balkans as the sign of the archaic

mother in immigrants connects the geopolitics of Europe, the formation

of "intimate democracy," and her own biography into a self-referential

scheme anchored in psychoanalytic theory. We may conclude, then, that

Kristeva's psychoanalytic exclusionism is ??//-orientalizing in the sense that

she locates and subjugates her Bulgarian origins as the east to her French

superego. Then, in turn?mimicking "nesting orientalisms"?to main

tain her identification with the French superego as her west, she oriental

izes "strangers."

That Kristeva has adopted the point of view of "the dominating other" as the healing process for the Balkans and immigrants is also evident in

her disregard of cultural, geographic, and historical contingencies of

place in formulating her discourse on exile. This ahistorical perspective becomes particularly problematic when she represents the Balkans as the

place of archaic violence, of unconscious desire, of the Freudian Tribe. In

fact, the history of the Balkans shows that violence there has been, for the most part, state-organized on behalf of European political ideals. In the

1990s, the violence that prompted Kristeva's psychoanalytic intervention

into the region stemmed from newly established ethnic states "defend

ing" the idea of nation and its founding myths against ethnic minori

ties. Finding the ethnic enemy, the "archaic" and "primitive" elements

usually located to the east, became the political obsession of Balkan na

tionalism. Kristeva's psychoanalytic interpretation of exile recreates this

obsession?in the heart of Paris?by situating the "archaic east" in the

psyche of "strangers" living there.

There is yet another parallel between Balkan nationalism and psycho

analysis. Both are founded on an originary myth. For the Serbs, for exam

ple, the Kosovo myth not only underlies the idea of the Serb nation-state

but serves to justify state-organized violence in the Kosovo region. In the case of psychoanalysis, it is the Oedipal myth that justifies Kristeva's des

ignation of the Balkans and immigrants as incomplete subjects. Psycho

analysis and nationalist mythologies, then, both operate in a closed grid of

power. The difference between the two is in the scope of their application. While the myths such as those that have been invoked to reinforce Balkan

nationalism remain local, the Oedipal myth of psychoanalysis is, by its own

definition, universally applicable and unassailable.74

73. Ibid., 79.

74. Kristeva articulates this borderless application of psychoanalysis as follows: "Be

yond the uncertainties and perversities of analytical institutions, psychoanalysis seems to

me to be the lay version, and the only one, of this search for the truth of the speaking be

ing which, from another point of view, is symbolized by religion for certain of my friends

and contemporaries. My own prejudice is believing that God is analyzable infinitely." Julia

Kristeva, "M?moire," L Infini 1 (Winter 1983): 45.