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Life in Kosovo debates Kosovo’s philosophy with Sllavoj Zhizhek

20 08 2009  Life in Kosovo contained an interview with famous Slovenian philosopher Sllavoj Zhizhek.

The show, hosted by Jeta Xharra, began with a short summary of Zhizhek’s life and work:

Sllavoj Zhizhek, a sociologist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and cultural critic, was born on March 21, 1949 in Ljubljana.

Zhizhek started his academic career at the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana University, continuing his studies in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris. However, his temperament led him to be viewed more as a revolutionary than a theorist. During the 1980s, he became politically active in Slovenia, and in 1990 became the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and thus a candidate for the country’s presidency.

However, his political life was a very short one, and he soon returned to his philosophical studies, becoming famous in the West for his critical theories. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Art and Science, and has become famous for his fascinating lectures and personality.

Indeed, the New York Times has branded him as an ‘Academic Rock Star’. Zhizhek has produced more than 40 books in English, which have been translated into more than 50 languages.

He has written on a huge range of topics, including Lenin, the War in Iraq, fundamentalism, tolerance, myth, radical politics, capitalism, communism, neoliberalism and post-modernism.

In the last 20 years, Zhizhek has participated in some 350 international philosophy symposiums as a critic in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Mexico and, in May this year, was a guest speaker in the National Library in Prishtina.

Life in Kosovo continued with an interview with Sllavoj Zhizhek conducted by Agon Hamza.

In the contemporary Balkans, it is widely believed that communism and socialism belong to the pervious century, and that life is now orientated towards the West.

However, Zhizhek believes that communism will win the day, so Hamza asked him how and why.

Zhizhek responded by asking which communism the interviewer was referring to, since he is well aware that the 1990s proved to be a well-deserved defeat for the new era of communism that “started at the October Revolution and ended in total disaster”.

Further, Zhizhek claimed that when a certain system, for instance liberal capitalism, is seen to ‘win’, all that contradicts it is thrown away without thought. This, he believes, is the situation in the Balkans today.

If the fal of the Berlin Wall in 1990 was a victory, Zhizhek said, then what can be seen in the first decade of the 21st-century is very different. “New walls are being built everywhere,” he said, through financial crises, so-called ‘terrorist attacks’ and so on.

For Zhizhek, these are signs that, in the long-term, liberal democratic capitalism is not the solution to the search for a political system.

He went on to argue that modern societies will have to start asking difficult questions. Until now, they have been dreaming of “socialism with a human face”, Zhizhek said, but now must begin to ask radical political and economic questions in order to test the fundamentals of the existing global system.

He went on to claim that whether we call it ‘communism’ or not, something which fundamentally resembles communism will have to be recreated.

Asked by Agon about why he believes Yugoslavia fell apart and what things caused it, Zhizhek claimed to have his own thesis.

Firstly, he does not believe that it was the result of 100,000 years of passions in the Balkans, nor that the present time is covering the past, but rather that “the ghosts of the past are mystifying the present”.

Thus, he believes, one does not need to understand the distant past in order to understand the recent history of the former Yugoslavia; indeed, it is designed to mask it.

Rather, Yugoslavia’s failure was sealed in the country’s economic fiasco in the global crisis of the early 1970s, he said.

Discussing Kosovo in his book The Fragile Absolute, Zhizhek develops his theory that “Kosovo’s Albanians are being supported as they remain victims.

If they want to move abroad they become a toxic subject; but if they stay inside Kosovo they become ‘fundamentalists, terrorists, radicals.

”When asked to explain, Zhizhek replied that “this is not unique to Kosovo, as this has been a general issue with western leaders, human rights protectors and liberals, who are like other passive actors.”

Zhizhek continued, saying that Kosovo has always been an issue viewed through specific lenses.

Just like every other nation in the former Yugoslavia, Serbia had tried to justify its activities through the presentation of itself and its activities to the West.

Each state had tried to show itself as protecting itself “against the other barbarians.” Serbs, Zhizhek said, tend to portray themselves to Western powers as part of the “Christian west” and Kosovo Albanians as Muslim extremists.

Zhizhek went on to say that, whilst Kosovo was not a constituent nation of the former Yugoslavia, it “does not need anyone else to play Balkan, since they are Balkan themselves.”

Asked if there is any truth in other people’s images of the Balkans, Zhizhek explained that “there is a truth in every projection,” and continued by saying that each one provides information not only about Kosovo and the region, but also about the beliefs and opinions of the onlooker.

He went on  to claim that each former Yugoslav state had had a prediction for its future. While it was left aside in the 1990s, Zhizhek said, Kosovo’s own time came, and had reached its conclusion in its declaration of independence.

In his discussions on multiculturalism in his books critiquing liberalism, which are currently popular in Bosnia and Kosovo, Zhizhek has argued that “the history and goals [of multiculturalism] are a problem, rather than a solution, since [my] task is not to reject the explicit goal of the multiculturalism…but rather because what underlines it is an obsession with depolitisation and the culturatisation of politics”.         

On the question of the support Kosovo received from the US during the 1998-99 war and what continued US support could bring Kosovo in the future, Zhizhek claimed that he is “not a leftist hypocrite who would deplore [Kosovo], accusing [it] of betraying the left by supporting American imperialism, since the European leftists did not support [Kosovo]”.

Before finishing his interview, Zhizhek mentioned that the idea of imposing multiculturalism will not last forever, since there are numerous problems in the Balkans subverting the “western ideal of an ideal country in the Balkans”.

For instance, he claimed, if there are two countries with the same ethnic group, such as Kosovo and Albania, they would not be harmed by becoming united. Rather, he said, a great deal of internal tension could be dealt with by doing so.

Finally, Zhizhek said that Kosovo can only function without remaining an international protectorate by choosing courses of actions that will generate some resistance.

Personally, he said he recommends opening the border with Albania, because that would also be in Europe’s favour, as “they like to have a lot of open borders”.
  



Life in Kosovo is a co-production between Kosovo Public Television, RTK and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN. It is broadcast every Thursday, starting at 20:20.