BOHM DIALOGUE
Damir Arsenijevic, Julia Ovcharenko, Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
Vol. 25 | September 25, 2022
Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv
Summary
Participants discuss the post-war experience of Bosnia as a continuation of war. The importance of naming wars is explored. The reductive effect of ethnic narratives. How do war profiteers gain political power? The Western liberal democracy is described in terms of division and ethnicity. The effect of different types of political subjectivity is illustrated. What can Ukraine contribute to the concept of liberal democracy? How can one think beyond the nation state? The horizon of hope during conflict. The urgent need to think about the future is raised. Ukraine’s fight is described in anti-imperialist terms. Legality as a construction is discussed.
Key words
Bosnia and Herzegovina Yugoslavia war Ukraine russia Ken Wilbеr nations liberal democracy ethnicity the future decolonization anti-imperialism epistemic communities law
Timecode
07:39 the importance of people-to-people connections
13:32 the Ukrainian perspective on the war
17:44 the importance of naming
22:42 ethnicity and division
35:10 dialogue as response to ruscism
38:21 definition of victory
44:25 the terror of peace
58:46 the nature of political signifiers
1:04:02 subjectivity in a national context
1:11:36 the world’s expectations of Ukraine
01:17:25 heroization
1:19:49 jokes and war
1:32:15 Ukraine’s fight for freedom
1:39:32 the anti-imperial struggle
Participants
A — Damir Arsenijevic
C — Chris Keulemans
D — Demyan Om
J — Julia Ovcharenko
THE DIALOGUE
C: Damir, I find these conversations very special. We’ve been talking with a number of different people over the past months. We barely talk about the day-to-day news of the war itself. What I really like about Demyan and Julia and their friends is that they’re trying to look beyond this war and to think about what kind of society we should live in later. From the beginning, I wondered how we might include somebody from Bosnia, because Bosnia and its people have been going through this long cycle of hope and rebuilding and disillusionment until this moment where the situation is made even more grim, because of the war in Ukraine and the power games that surround that.
A: I’ve heard you say that part of the conversation is about looking at the society post-war. What I’ve been finding out ever since ‘96 is whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m writing, whatever I’m thinking about, I’m actually seeing the continuation of war by other means. Whether it’s through locating mass graves and writing about them, whether it’s thinking about trauma, whether it’s thinking about hazardous waste being hidden and buried in an unknown location, it’s the same thing. For me it’s about the continuation of wartime logic, whether it’s working with patients in psychoanalysis or opening up spaces for psychologic thinking about the unconscious of war and genocide, and how they continue in Bosnian society. It’s difficult not to see war everywhere when the instability is so great.
I wrote to Chris how important it was during the war for people to feel that they’re not alone. That’s the ultimate solidarity, because this kind of solitude of us as speaking beings is the worst thing. When there isn’t the ear to hear you or when your voice falls into this kind of void, it’s the most important thing, because you are reduced to this lesser than life being.
[07:39]
A: Everything I’ve done after the war is about setting up the connections, is about enabling connections, because war is about severing the connections. Trauma is about keeping all the engines going, so that connections between people do not happen.
C: Zoom now, of course, helps us build these connections, but you mentioned a few very fundamental things. In a society of the future after the war, after the victory, the war will continue with other means, the trauma, the waste, the evil. This will in way always remain part of society.
J: After the war that came to Ukraine, we discovered how many wars are still continuing all around the world. Before, when we didn’t have it in our country, we did not pay attention to the evil that is happening elsewhere. This makes us also ask ourselves not only how to stop war in Ukraine or how to get to victory, but how to do something that would help stop wars all around the world. I see it makes you smile, but it also puts the question on a different perspective. How do we not let people ignore wars happening in other places and not let them call those ‘local’ wars, especially now that we see the enemy is all around and the same. russia supports war in different countries, sending their troops there or paying for their weapons or following their political interests there. This is just one point, about one enemy, but we could expand to evil as a philosophical term and to being criminal as being a human, or less than human.
A: What do you call this war? Do you have the name for the war?
[13:32]
J: This name developed and changed during the months. It’s definitely war, it’s not a conflict, it’s not anything like dancing around something uncomfortable that we can see in press, in media in different countries. For Ukraine it’s definitely the war. It is not new, it’s the war that began in 2014 in the eastern part of Ukraine. russian war in Ukraine, that’s the main name of it.
C: Why are you asking, Damir?
A: It’s really interesting, because in 2011, almost like 11 years ago now, I was part of this artistic group, monument group. We started working in 2008, so our premise was that you couldn’t build a monument to the war, we called it the war against Yugoslavia. That the only monument that could be formed is a public discussion in communities about the war. As part of that I had a reading group and a little working group ‘The name of the war.’ I worked intergenerationally in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but with a group of people who were born into the war, who were born after the war, and then I was the one with the experience of the war as a teenager, so the question was what we called the war, because in Bosnia the war was just called ‘the war.’ People in Croatia had a name for the war, and Serbia didn’t because it never allegedly happened there. There were all these different nomenclatures that spoke about people’s attitude and ideological positions in relation to what happened and why people call the war differently than the other.
[17:44]
C: It’s a really relevant question, because in the Bosnian case during the war and after the war many people on the outside of the western powers kept calling it a civil war.
A: Exactly.
C: Which meant that it was a war inside the borders of a country between those people, and all sides were equally guilty.
A: Exactly.
C: And that was very destructive for the support that was mobilized during the war and after the war. The dominant narrative in the Western capitals was all those people are guilty, all those parties are guilty. None of them should deserve our hundred percent support.
A: And there were all these ethnic groups, so the narrative also reduced it to ethnicity. I belatedly came to realize that there is truth about it being called the civil war, insofar as there was a particular elite that led the war against Yugoslavia to come to power, and of course do the transition into capitalism, and then ethno-nationalist elites completely stole the communes from the people and started managing them in their own authoritarian ways increasingly. It is about how a particular class got rich through the war. I’m sure that is going to be the case in Ukraine that there will be war profiteers, and this is going to cause a lot of corrosive feelings in the post-war reconstructions, where there’s going to be the question, so what did people die for? They die for this, whatever is the post-war condition. This is the bitterness that we have to live with. It was something that wasn’t seen during the war, because things are very simple, and when the grenades are falling onto you for four-five years and it’s a simple matter of life or death.
C: You’re raising two issues I would like to hear about from Julia and Demyan, and after that I wanted to ask you Damir to take us back to the moment that you and a lot of other people in Bosnia were imagining the future. Because, of course, there was a moment when there was a lot of global support, a lot of energy, a lot of imagination, and a lot of ideas about what kind of society Bosnia should be. But first, about the name for the war. If any of the occupied territories are declared officially russia, then any military movement by the Ukrainian Army will be defined as an act of war against russia, and again the word ‘war’ becomes very important. The other thing you mentioned, Damir, is war profiteers, criminals coming out of the war, who in Bosnia have succeeded in dominating society. Demyan is very worried about this too.
[22:42]
J: Is that how they came to politics, Damir? Or were they already in politics and just maintained their presence?
A: Well, for us that’s transition into democracy. The Western liberal democracy is about ethnicity and division. The West cannot think in any other terms, but in ethnic terms. It cannot imagine a society being put together if it’s not dominated by ethnicity. In Yugoslavia, of course, there was always a tension following the Revolutionary War or World War II: you had this anti-fascist movement. World War II in Yugoslavia was talked about by the partisans as the war against the war, a war for peace. But to fast-forward, the revolutionary subject that was formed, the political people that was formed in the revolution, an anti-fascist struggle, were not ethnic people, there was something more, there was something else in the socialist society, in Yugoslav socialism that had nothing to do with the rest of the socialism.
Yugoslavia was part of the non-aligned movement and it wasn’t part of the Soviet block. In the constitution, we had the political category of the working people, they were the constitutional subject. Now we have Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, etc. There were nationalities from which Yugoslavia was composed, but constitutionally they were imagined as a political subject that is not ethnified. If you start talking about socialism to anyone from the West, they immediately go blank. They think that’s obsolete, that shouldn’t exist, etc. Come the dominance of private property and the need to restructure the country along liberal capitalist lines, you only have elites who are willing to do that in blood, and they are ethnic elites, and they get support from the west. During the peace negotiations they are the only ones who are recognized as participants. Then the constitution gets written in the states, at Dayton, with only ethnic subjects being recognized as constituent peoples. I as a Bosnian cannot be elected in my own country, because I actually identify with the country not with ethnicity. Therein lies the catch, and I know this may be a bit complicated and crazy sounding, but it is the madness that was imposed on us.
C: It’s complicated to translate this to the Ukrainian situation, but, Julia and Demyan, for our conversation this is very relevant point, because there’s a lot of support from the West right now for Ukraine, of course, which means that sooner or later after the victory with Western support comes a liberal democracy, and then you have to be very careful. In Ukraine it might not be the matter of ethnicity, although it’s a very important question too, but liberal democracy western-style can cause different kinds of fragmentations in the society of the future.
J: It’s good to understand how ethnicity plays a role in the Yugoslav territory in South Europe. The density of people from different ethnic groups and the long history of being together—perhaps, these are not possible to solve through the concept of nation, a national country. We already discussed how the concept of nation-state is outdated and not fit for our era, after globalization, when people travel and freely choose countries where they want to live. A political nation is something that defines a country. This is also the issue for Ukraine now, and this is how our society feels united. It’s not about your roots, it’s not about your blood, where you come from or who are your ancestors, this is about the feeling of where you belong and what you want to do for this group of people, even if this group is a multi-million-strong state.
What do you take your responsibility for, where do you stand and say ‘Okay, this is my value, I share this value with other people and I will act for that, even if it costs my life, even if the price is so high.’ So Ukrainians are more united by this feeling of doing something for our future.
D: Absolutely.
J: This makes me think of integral theory described by Ken Wilber, the levels of values. He offers the idea about the levels of consciousness development, and they are identified by colors, that’s why sometimes they say green level or orange level or even red level. The values go from very personal, private, like me, my food, my resources, my home, my belongings, to family, a small social circle around a person. Then groups… Nations are one of the groups, where people feel belonging. Then the levels after are other wide values, they make us feel something that unites people all around the globe, and it’s not connected to territory or blood. This makes me think that the solution for a non-conflict being on a territory in a country with a multinational composition is about finding other points of connection and not being led by this national our ethnic description.
Thank you for speaking about the Western influence on development. Milan Šimečka also said “When the West comes with money or if you become a part of the European Union they will tell you what to do and how to act. They would tell you how to build your society, like they know better.” Maybe it is egoistic and bold, but Ukrainians right now are discussing in philosophical circles, in intellectual circles how Ukraine might change the concept of European Union and how Ukraine can contribute to the concept of liberal democracy. If it’s not functional enough to create a good future for us, how can we now think about the development of this concept?
C: What are you thinking Demyan?
[35:10]
D: I’m thinking of how we are creating this future and not only in Ukraine, of course. We can export our ideas from Ukraine, but it is not about exporting, it’s about dialogue. The coming-together of people against ruscism, against this form of terrorism, has prompted a wide dialogue about borders in our future. There are different forms of dialogue in the arts and in literature, of course.
[38:21]
J: If we start by defining a name for a particular war, we can then expand from there to the definition of victory. If it’s a war about values, not about resources, but we as people find that spiritual, ethical, and moral questions are on the table, then only resolving these questions will bring about the end of the war.
C: So what is the victory for you Damir?
A: I couldn’t help but think of Walter Benjamin and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ And there is a phrase in one of the thesis that says, the enemy, meaning fascism, hasn’t ceased to be victorious. “Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy..” Yugoslavia never had an army that would fight the war for peace, an international army. The thing that we can see in Ukraine, we didn’t have; something similar existed in Bosnia and Herzegovina and even that was given up in 1993. Giving up on the united front to defend Bosnia and Herzegovina was wrong; it was done because of various sanctions, political pressures from abroad and from within home. That was our trauma giving in to pressure and giving up on defending the idea of a unified country, of a country that is not defined by ethnicity.
Earlier we were talking about how we think of the people who are there defending and fighting for Ukraine. Can they enjoy the victory that you’re talking about if they are not Ukrainian, but they are vesting their lives, interests, hopes and aspirations in Ukraine? The question is almost akin to, can we think beyond the nation state? You’re talking about the possibility of opening up Europe that only knows ethnicity, Europe that cannot move beyond thinking that is not ethnic. It’s a great opening, it’s a great opportunity, but it’s also a large trap.
[44:25]
A: For Bosnia the war hasn’t ended and we live this terror of peace. You either accept this ethnic division, and you have to accept this injustice and peace agreement, and you have to accept the reduction of your political subjectivity— or it’s going to be mayhem and conflict. It’s a forced choice which is a false choice. There needs to be a third position. You have to execute yourself as a political being and accept ethnicity as the only possible way through which you can exercise your rights. That is not normal. That is no victory. This is a defeat for me. It’s a defeat of political imagination. It’s about how bones are identified from mass graves. They’re ethnified immediately; the bureaucrat, the scientists and the priest come together to decide what these bones are. They’re internationally managed, ethnified and then put through this religious ritual and made into the golden currency of ethnic elites.
Because they can always rule through insecurity, through this threat of a new war. The dead are not going to be safe, if the nation-state wins. My victory would be the victory of a political community that goes beyond ethnicity.
C: Ethnicity beyond the false choice between ethnicity and chaos.
A: Yes.
C: It’s incredible how you convey the Bosnian situation in just a few sentences. It’s very very cruel. I’m trying to listen and learn and to translate this to the future of what’s going to happen in Ukraine. We’ve been discussing here earlier and with other people about how this war prompts a serious discussion about Ukrainian identity. Of course national identities are very often developed through war, through the necessity of defining your identity as opposed to the enemy. This is happening in Ukraine now too. If what Damir describes for Bosnia would happen in Ukraine that would mean after the victory you would be stuck into the reduction of being defined only by your national identity and by nothing else.
J: This ethnic concept seems to be so outdated and yet insistently brought from the past and forced upon societies that are much more innovative than this idea. Thinking of Ukraine, I see that in the last 30 years after the independence from the Soviet Union now is the first time when Ukrainians have the biggest territory under one official name and all the people, who felt disconnected for centuries can be united in a state, in a country. The last time when Ukrainians felt this united may have been during Kyivan Rus in the 10th century, before the territory got broken up by different empires. This is still wonderful for me. I feel it, I know it just by knowing, but I cannot explain how in historical terms, in cultural terms, how it was possible to keep the Ukrainian identity after all the destruction, after all the attempts to destroy Ukrainian language, Ukrainian arts, Ukrainian identity.
This invasion is another attempt to separate people inside our country by saying that some of them are more russians than Ukrainians. At the same time we have many ethnic groups living in Ukraine: Armenians, Azerbaijanis, many Tatar ethnicities in Crimea and the Carpathian groups. Their language may be really hard to understand for me as a Ukrainian, but we still are completely sure we are Ukrainians together. Politicians tried to develop the concept of difference based on the language. But it’s just an instrument, it was never a conflict inside the society: what language you speak or what you read, what religion you are. The Western part of Ukraine is more Catholic, the central and the Eastern part are more Orthodox or non-religious at all after the Soviets. It’s still not a problem of being together. There are other things that keep people connected. Sometimes they are not verbalized, so scientists try to verbalize and analyze that, like perhaps it’s the arts, or traditions, or it’s indeed the language. But still there’s something else, and people come to fight for Ukraine from other countries, and they say that it’s not about ethnicity at all, there are other values that people are fighting for, that Americans, British people come to fight for.
C: The question will be if these values can dominate the reductive narrative of the Western liberal democracy and the model that it will place upon you.
J: And that makes the case more complicated. If this concept is not fixed yet, if it’s still developing and the discourse for it is not developed, it’s just emerging. How do we keep the momentum and how do we get this concept rooted before possessive powers come?
C: You are part of circles of writers, philosophers, academics, thinkers, who are right now having these conversations to redefine the values you’re fighting for, no?
J: Most discussions are taking place online in broadcasts, in interviews, in dialogues. It’s such a shame that they are in Ukrainian language—these conversations are not easy to share.
C: Damir is also part of a smaller and smaller circle of real thinkers about the future of Bosnia, so it’s also interesting for me to hear what the thinkers of Ukraine are talking about right now.
[58:46]
J: The continuity of the Ukrainian mind. Also Ukrainian philosophy.
A: I’m thinking, the name Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost an empty signifier that politically is completely impossible, and yet we live in Bosnia and Herzegovina that is attempted to be divided constantly. As a country it exists in constant dissolution and that is its blessing and its curse, because it gives you a horizon of hope and of imagination to think of it as a non-finite non-national phenomenon but as that which includes within itself myriad political possibilities of emancipation. This is what gives me hope even though it makes me utterly despair every time. The minute you think of ethnicity, you think of the dissolution of the country. My question is, can Ukraine stand for anti-colonial struggle beyond a nation?
D: I don’t understand why Western people talk about colonial and postcolonial culture, literature and so on, because in my mind it’s only about imperialization. I am interested in how to create something without imperia. Ukraine as a country or Ukraine as a people was under occupation, different occupations and that’s all, it was never a colony. We don’t have postcolonial Ukrainian literature, for example. We have Ukrainian literature. Maybe we can talk about post- russian literature, but it is not interesting for us.
[1:04:02]
J: It used to be called post-Soviet, this term was common for a period of time. Talking about decolonization or deimperialization: it’s a question of subject, who are you talking about and who is talking. Colonies are taken as objects usually and they have no subjectivity, and decolonization is like helping someone weaker to get rebuilt after the imperial presence. That’s the case with many, and it implies that there is someone stronger, who comes with better sources, with better knowledge and helps these people to get better.
C: So you prefer post-imperial to postcolonial.
D: We don’t talk about the colonial and imperial. We talk about independent peoples, independent literature, new literature, maybe subcultural literature.
C: Is this an answer to your question, Damir?
A: Well, no, but what I’m hearing is there is a pull between, and it’s a paradox, how do you fight and support something that is primarily national i.e. Ukrainian, within which it contains so many things, but it’s a nation state signifier. What I’m hearing is there are many valences to this war. One is about national liberation, the other one is anti-imperial war, anti-terrorist war. These are all the signifiers, and none of them is an innocent signifier. Each signifier carries the world-view behind it. It carries within itself the burden of what the country is like for the people who live in it. It shapes the country and shapes potential subjectivities for its people.
It is not a luxury to think about these things, it is actually a matter of survival. Would I like Bosnia to be a nation-state? I don’t know, because it hasn’t been since the peace agreement, and part of me is very angry because of it. I can think of real political struggles coming as a result of it. You talk about the victory. victory also presumes peace, and or is it victory without peace? A victory with constant war? Or do we call it a struggle? What kind of instability is going to continue? Then again it is the question of borders, how do we maintain these borders.
C: You ask, is it a luxury or an escape or necessity to have these kinds of conversations in wartime? Which is what Yulia and Demyan and their friends are doing right now. To me it seems essential to do so exactly in wartime. But it seems like you’re not sure about that.
[1:11:36]
A: I’m not sure, because I feel that I’m imposing this as a question, because the world expects too much of Ukrainians. That’s not fair; the world doesn’t have the right to project so many aspirations of itself onto Ukrainians, it cannot scapegoat Ukrainians like this.
I’m thinking of this as opulence. You must be given the opulence as the abundance of time and resources to think, to write, to laugh, to play. This is also the struggle.
C: If I understand you correctly, you’re saying the expectations from the outside world, especially the Western powers that are now being put on Ukrainians as the heroic people, the people who are leading us to the future, those expectations are too high. You go even one step further, you say it’s a sign of opulence, of an overload of expectations to assume that Ukrainians should be the ones thinking, writing, talking a way forward out of this crisis. It’s a very interesting thought. If this is true then I’m certainly guilty of this as well myself.
It makes me think of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war and especially of Sarajevo. I remember people in the West in intellectual circles saying, ‘Oh, but those people in Bosnia, those are the best Muslims in the world.’ They were sanctified. Sarajevo is the ideal city of hybrid cultures, ethnicities, religions, so Sarajevo itself was sanctified. The artists and the thinkers within Sarajevo started believing that they were the most special and gifted people in the world. So it’s tricky territory.
[01:17:25]
J: Heroization is a way to support people in their fight. Finding the words to name Bosnians as the best Muslims or Ukrainians as heroes of today is good to give people energy in their fight. Damir, you speaking about expectations that are too high makes me think of a meme. This particular joke came up in July when Ukrainian grain could not be shipped to Africa to prevent famine. Ukrainians made this list of what was expected, like win the war inside Ukraine, demolish the russian empire, rethink the Western democracy, help the world to avoid famine, make art, and stay in a good mood. There is truth in this joke, but it’s also a real list of challenges that we are facing right now.
[1:19:49]
A: Thank you so much for telling this joke. As somebody working with psychoanalysis, a few years back, I had the whole psychoanalytic group formed, and it was called ‘Jokes, war and genocide.’ It was about jokes about war and genocide being collected and analyzed.
There is something about neoliberal subjectivity that you’re talking about being developed. It is about, not only do you have to be a superhuman with all the superpowers and do all these things, but when you’re suffering you have to be a cheerful subject as well. There is not even a space for victimhood. There is the cheerfulness that you have to exhibit.
J: And if you can’t, you get antidepressants for your depression.
A: That’s bullshit. People have the right to feel the gamut of feelings and the battle is to keep the right to maintain all these feelings at the same time. This is the opulence that I’m talking about. You have the right to claim all these positions, all these emotions as your own. Because you can be sad, angry, pissed off, being in the mood to retaliate, being in the mood to murder, being in the mood to be happy, being in the mood to make love, being in the mood for all these things.
J: And this all is present. All the emotions are here. If Ukrainians lose against ruscism, there will be genocide. There’s no choice, really. The question is, do we cross the border? Should we do that to russian people or the people on this territory of the russian federation, who are under inner occupation now, how to help them liberate themselves? And should Ukrainians do that? Understanding evil is not enough. It must be destroyed completely. I’m asking myself again if this is again asking too much from us. But still the question is open and it’s circling in intellectual conversations in Ukraine, and I’m not sure that this question appears in Western discourses.
A: My immediate knee-jerk reaction was thinking about Bosnians becoming the international experts on forensics and on administering wars, that you could have Bosnians being sent around the world to excavate mass graves and do the forensic identification of them. The second thing is Bosnians working in American military bases to service American imperial wars, so we can’t talk only of the russian empire, we’re talking about the American empire as well. The question is do we liberate America as well from its own throes of imperialism and exporting wars elsewhere? Because empires are ultimately about that. They export wars elsewhere, so that their internal contradictions do not show up as civil war in their own country. Is this the expectation that Ukrainians are going to be crusaders of freedom? There is a question posed here about what kind of subjectivity are we performing and for whom. Because underneath all the seeming homogeneity under the name of Ukrainian exists a myriad of contradictions that the war kind of does away with.
C: For now.
A: For now, exactly.
J: It’s still obvious for me that we can formulate questions like this only during a war.
A: This would be something genuinely novel. The anti-imperial stance. Ukraine is the name for anti-imperial struggle. If you posit it like this, the subjectivity that opens up as belonging to Ukraine is a richer thing, because then you can’t shy away from all the imperialist politics that still dominate the world. Think about it, Europe is going to be dissolving soon along the far right lines. I dread to think what kind of imperial politics is going to happen. I’m thinking about genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, where you had the U.N Dutch Battalion, the Serb forces, Golden Dawn members, russian paramilitaries: it doesn’t become an ethnic war, it becomes a fascist war that executes people. It’s about the structures that enable all these right-wing paramilitaries to coalesce. There’s so much complexity, it’s much easier to say, Serbs killed Bosniaks. Well, no. Yes and no. It is almost like saying that 10 000 people executed died their own death. Yes, they individually died, but it was part of a collective project to kill them. They cannot be memorialized only ethnically or individually, but socially i.e. politically.
C: Same goes for the perpetrators.
A: Exactly.
[1:32:15]
C: You’re expanding the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of Ukraine. It’s a very sad image, Damir, of Ukraine fighting the anti-imperial fight and Bosnia digging up the bones all over the world.
A: The picture depends on whether the Ukrainian experience creates mercenaries for the neoliberal democracy, or fighters for anti-imperialism, because then there are two different things. If Ukrainians are mercenaries for liberal democracies, this sacrifices Ukrainians and and puts them as puppets for a particular worldview, for a particular ideology. The other picture is about the fight for freedom into which everybody is invited. In the first scenario not everybody is invited. The proper anti-imperialist stance is going to incur the wrath of China, America, India.
J: Damir, do you see any possibility for the Yugoslav countries to be together overcoming this condition of being ethnic states? A way to unite again and find a way to be together as a complete society?
A: We exist as a society—online. We exist as these epistemic communities, traveling as artists, as writers, as people who understand the language and who are bitter about it and angry because they live in these many ethnic states that don’t have any power over themselves, because they’re governed from elsewhere. Croatia from the EU, Serbia, you know. Everywhere little authoritarian elites maintain the divisions. The genocide and the war were precisely to make sure that Yugoslavia never exists again. It is the golden investment into it never existing again, because the minute you start thinking about the polity—because that’s what we are talking about: a polity that can be open to political subjectivities other than ethnic—you will immediately have a knee-jerk reaction, look, this is what happens when you have a polity that enables political participation that’s not ethnic. It results in war and genocide. The retroactive reinscription of the necessary destiny of any polity that is not ethnic as one that’s going to suffer the fate of war and genocide is very difficult to undo.
J: Finding a reason, an economic or social reason to be united might perhaps be the way to overcome the division?
A: I cannot apply the models of the European Union, because Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo are held as ghettos surrounded by Europe. They are held as ghettos where people are exhausted and where all sorts of labor practices exist that are unheard of and unacceptable, including people wearing diapers in factories, so that they are more productive and they don’t go to the bathroom. This is what capitalism is about, and we are talking about dying societies. Bosnia has now probably fewer than three million people. People have lost all hope and just want to leave to the EU, and the EU practices extractivist politics and offers positions for young people under 35 to come do menial jobs and be grateful for that. Why do we have this kind of empty ghetto amidst the EU, if not as a laboratory for practices of governmentality? Of course, the problem is the minute I say that, I sound like a far right person. In these kinds of times you have the rightist and leftist articulations almost seem similar, but they are actually uttered on behalf of different types of universalities. When far rightists utter that they don’t want the EU, they don’t want it on behalf of their own little nationalist state that is free of anybody else who doesn’t belong to them, who’s not performing the nation as they should. People from the left come and utter it on behalf of different type of universality that thinks about political participation along different lines.
[1:39:32]
D: Chris, about the miracle phrase you created—the name for the anti-imperial struggle, what do you think about this?
A: My first reaction to this was covering my eyes, because there is this Hegelian notion that evil is that which sees evil everywhere around it. I’m thinking about how in this attempt to eradicate that which we perceive as evil we start carrying out atrocities. It becomes like the French Revolution going completely berserk. Who decides what criminality is? But when you think about it, people are criminalized constantly. Minority sexualities were criminalized and executed as a result of this. What I like about the anti-imperial struggle is that it really posits itself against something that’s been thought of and theorized and something that has a strong legacy. For all of us who think about anti-imperial war, anti-imperial struggle, both Lenin and Franz Fanon are our collocators. Unashamedly so. It is our right to bring both of them around our table. It is this tradition of the oppressed.
C: I agree. And you’re warning us about going in this anti-criminal direction.
A: I’m warning you against this anti-criminal thing, because there is something about legality of it that bothers me a lot, because so many laws have been constructed to criminalize people and execute them with or without impunity.
The reason I’m feeling such a strong reaction around this is the way the international justice system operated for the war against Yugoslavia. This is what I’m afraid is going to be happening in Ukraine, that you will have a handful of war criminals being put on trial. Culpability is going to be individualized, i.e. privatized, and no criminality of structure or structural responsibility is going to be put on trial. Let me give you an example. A handful of war criminals were tried, and some of them released having served the sentence, in Bosnian War. The political project that stood behind the concentration camps and mass graves was never put on trial. It is the political project that stands behind the executions, the shellings, and the mass graves in Ukraine that needs to be put on trial. If there is one thing that I would use my last breath for, it is to say to you ‘Don’t let individualized culpability take over.’ Because it is not five-six people who should be put on trial. It’s a political project that enabled this, the imperial political project, authoritarian imperial project.
Questions
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Consider the concept of epistemic communities. Can you conceive of a nation as one? What would be the implications of such a concept?
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Damir Arsenijevic says, “You must be given the opulence as the abundance of time and resources to think, to write, to laugh, to play.” What practices can help create such opulence on a personal and a community level?
Resources
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Translated by Dennis Redmond. 2005. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
