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

Chapter 1. Community, Power, and the Body

21 chaPTer 1 community, Power, and the Body Anthropological, feminist, and even psychoanalytical studies frequently posit the motif of human sacrifice as a culturally nonspecific event, as a “civilizational ” act par excellence. Many of their propositions are in tune with the imagery found in the Balkan legend of immurement. The well-known Freudian establishing of parricide as the founding social event in Totem and Taboo (1913) stipulates the origin of society as disloyalty to the father and subsequent conflict and rivalry among brothers. Freud’s sacrificial victim is the mythical aging and weakened patriarch/king, whose social position is challenged by younger and healthier men. By sacrificing the father (and consuming his body) the sons have already created a community founded on guilt over the common crime that will be expiated in ever-new cycles of sacrifice. There is no place for women in this exchange, and they merely change hands from father to sons in the process of the transfer of power. Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972) likewise recognizes sacrifice in the very foundation of society and its rituals, yet he does not consider the gender or status of the victim as significant. He notes that civilization is inextricably linked with violence through sacrificial mechanisms and that everything known 22 community, Power, and the Body to us—our cultural institutions, rituals, and linguistic structure—occludes murder. In Girard’s work the indeterminacy of the nature of the sacrificial victim is such that Girard barely distinguishes between human and animal sacrifices; animals are even frequently substituted as surrogates for human sacrifices or murdered as accidental victims of accumulated rage at the perpetrator ’s inability to vent his or her anger at a human. In fact, Girard sees most sacrificial victims as surrogates: animals or objects absorb the violence intended for a human, aliens are targeted by the violence intended for the preservation of internal social order but channeled away from the community ’s integrated members. Feminism, especially in its older and more radical forms, refocuses our attention on the Balkan narrative by insisting that our whole symbolic order is founded on the murder of woman/mother at the threshold of the explicitly patriarchal (and frequently chauvinist) communal project. In attempts to displace male ownership of the symbolic, radical feminism places the female sacrifice as the original and ultimate foundation of the symbolic order, thus privileging the female victim over others. Any other sacrificed body necessarily substitutes for the actual and original victim, who in feminist readings is always a woman/mother. In spite of Freud, feminism insists that the original sacrifice was represented not by the murder of the father, but by the institutionalized, legalized, and normativized suppression of the mother’s/female body. As Luce Irigaray states, “when Freud talks about the father being torn apart by the sons in the primeval horde, isn’t he, out of full-scale denial and misunderstanding, forgetting the woman who has been torn between son and father, among sons?”1 Woman becomes an appropriate sacrificial victim only through male domination and ownership of her body, which gives it the value of the liminal status of a femina sacra. Hélène Cixous likewise denies the phallus its purported centrality as the signifier, the position it holds in psychoanalytical theory, and situates the mother at the locus of feminine writing.2 She thus exposes and deconstructs female sacrifice as the foundation stone of the patriarchal social/national project, as well as the totality of the systems of knowledge on which humanity is founded. To a certain extent this may be interpreted as simple reversal of the gendered role of the systems of knowledge and language that does little else but create a feminist utopia, complete with instruments of particular female literary creation untouched by the phallogocentric universe. The task of women’s writing, Cixous states, is to dismantle the “solidarity of logocentrism and phallocentrism” by “bringing to light of the fate which has been imposed upon woman, of her burial—to threaten the stability of the masculine edifice which passed itself off as eternalnatural; by bringing forth from community, Power, and the Body 23 the world of femininity reflections, hypotheses which are necessarily ruinous for the bastion which still holds the authority. What would become of logocentrism, of the great philosophical systems, of world order in general if the rock upon which they founded their church were to...