Fun times with Slavoj Zizek

In Autumn 1992, after I had delivered a lecture on Hitchcock at an American campus, a member of the public asked me indignantly: How can you talk about such a trifling subject when you ex-country is dying in flames? My answer was: How is it that you in the USA can talk about Hitchcock? There is nothing traumatic in me behaving as befits a victim and testifying to the horrible events in my country—such behaviour cannot but arouse compassion and a false feeling of guilt that is the negative of a narcissistic satisfaction – that is, of my audience’s awareness that are all right while things are going badly for me. But I vioate a silent prohibition the moment I start to behave like them and talk about Hitchcock, not about the horrors of war in ex-Yugoslavia…This experience of mine tells us a lot about what is really unbearable to the Western gaze in the present Balkan conflict. Suffice it to recall a typical report from besieged Sarajevo: reporters compete with each other on who will find a more repulsive scene—lacerated children’s bodies, raped women, starved prisoners: all this is good fodder for hungry western eyes. However, the media are far more sparing of words apropros of how the residents of Sarajevo desperately endeavour to maintain the appearance of normal life. The tragedy of Sarjevo is epitomized in an elderly clerk who takes a walk to his office every day as usual, but has to quicken his pace at a certain crossroads because of a Serbian sniper lurks on a nearby hill; in a disco that operates ‘normally’, although one can hear explosions in the background; in a young woman who forces her way through ruins to the court in order to obtain a divorce so that she can start to live with her lover; in the issue of the Bosnian cinema monthly that appeared in Sarajevo in spring 1993 and published essays on Scorsese and Almodovar…

The unbearable is not the difference. The unbearable is the fact that in a sense there is no difference: there are no exotic bloodthirsty ‘balkanians’ in Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us. The moment we take full not of this fact, the frontier that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ is exposed in all its arbitrariness, and we are forced to renounce the safe distance of external observers: as in a Moebius band, the part and the whole coincide, so that it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line of separation between us who live in a ‘true’ peace and the residents of Sarajevo who pretend as far as possible that they are living in peace—we are forced to admit that in a sense we also imitate peace, live in a the fiction of peace. Sarajevo is not an island, an exception within the sea of normality; on the contrary, this alleged normality is itself an island of fictions within the common warfare. This is what we try to elude by stigmatizing the victim—that is, by locating the victim in the blemished domain between the two deaths: as if the victim were a pariah, a kind of living dead confined to the sacred fantasy-space.

Slavoj Zizek—The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality.