The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom

Chapter 5. Demystifying the Sacrificial Imperative of History

151 chaPTer 5 demystifying the Sacrificial imperative of history Literature’s fascination with History (capital letter intended), the relationship that treats history as a metacognitive force existing outside of human influence and imparting its deadly blows upon us with divine disinterestedness , is a common trope. Much has been written about the awe with which humans, individuals and collectives alike, await these devastating blows and their helplessness in the face of history. Modernism tends to rewrite it as the individual’s “problem with history,” the subject’s valiant struggle as a failure marked with Sisyphean pathos. Not even the postmodern proverbial “playfulness ” in the vision of history as a backdrop for many a convoluted individual (his)tory can obscure the fearful resignation with which the protagonist awaits the inevitable axe against his neck. If anything can be said about the use of history in the literatures of the Balkans, it is that it is not merely a force to be reckoned with, but one fully determining the course of human lives. Even a brief scan of the material discussed in this book attests to the fact that history has been and remains one of the major concerns, literary and otherwise, whose significance is unabating. And this is the case regardless of whether the individual protagonist’s position on the historical narrative 152 demystifying the Sacrificial imperative of history is one of victory and bravery in the face of death, or of an obscene spectacle of carnage shrouded in a jargon of pseudo-values and masquerading as a force outside humanity’s grasp. Despite all mystification, the victim of historical horrors frequently reserves his respect for victims while demonstrating more than an irreverent attitude toward history and the almost divine disinterestedness with which it sacrifices bodies and humanity itself. When Foucault proposed a genealogical study of history, he did not suggest a study of history per se, but instead an in-depth process of uncovering the imprints that history makes on the body. Genealogical study places the body in the center of interest and demystifies the overwhelming force of history itself. The body becomes “the inscribed surface of events” and “a volume in perpetual disintegration,” on which history writes its narrative. It “manifests the stigmata of past experience” and is in a constant process of disintegration that consequently prevents the construction of a coherent body of truth/history/knowledge. The ultimate task of genealogy, therefore, is to “expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.”1 Some of this fateful connectedness between history and the body is present in Lacanian structuralism, which creates the foundations of both culture and history on the fully deterministic existence of the letter. The body is thus already inscribed with the historical text, and it can do little but follow and fulfill this inscription: “And the subject, while he may appear to be the slave of language, is still more the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name. Reference to the experience of the community as the substance of this discourse resolves nothing. For this experience takes on its essential dimension in the tradition established by this discourse. This tradition, long before the drama of history is inscribed in it, grounds the elementary structures of culture.”2 History, tradition, and culture exist as a superstructure to the overdeterministic discourse, while restrictive communal dictates (and sacrifices) look likewise like more of a command by an outside force (villa, big Other) than a decision made by the community. Every- and anybody is merely a surface that records the historical narrative and acts upon its prompts. Individuals seem to have no agency in the process and merely exist within the strictly posited boundaries of a text written outside and in spite of them. Community that arises on the sacrifice of such a body is equally impotent in the face of its own historical destiny, and it reiterates ad infinitum this same law/letter that is stamped in its foundations but that it did nothing to shape or transform. If a collectivity cannot be the master of its existence, how can an individual expect to become a free subject outside of such a limiting and already prescribed genetic code? demystifying the Sacrificial imperative of history 153 If victimhood and thus...