Criminology

The invention of the Balkans as Europe’s subaltern pre-dates Freud, but he established future justification for curing the Balkans from its “Oriental Yoke.” During a trip to the Balkans in the spring and summer of 1898, at the peek of his self-analysis, Freud encountered his repressed sexuality, but his forbidden desire helped him to craft the theory of the “unconscious.” On the one hand, Freud relies on the Balkan subaltern and its potent libidinal force to challenge established sexual dogma and the morality of the European bourgeoisie; on the other hand, he declares the Balkans a dangerous zone—pathological, anal, “archaic,” and in need of Oedipalization. During his visit to the Acropolis in 1904, Freud had a brief glimpse into Western colonial geography and Orientalism as its constitutive bias, but he failed to develop a proper response to it since he had regarded Orientalism to be part of being civilized and European.

The aim of this paper is to give a self-reflective account of the building of Galileo's pendulum in order to discover what were the practical contingencies of building and using the pendulum
for demonstrating the law of isochronism. In doing this, the unique Lebenswelt structures of "Galilean physics" are explicated through the ethnomethodological concepts developed
by Harold Garfinkel. The presupposition is that the practical logic of "Galilean physics" is embedded in the instruments themselves. In building the pendulum and recovering its original
use, "Galilean physics" becomes for ethnomethodologists a first-hand practical discovery. This is not a reconstruction of the mind of the historical Galileo but, rather, an explication
of Galileo's practical perspective on the instrument as an intersubjective and interchangeable standpoint available for ethnomethodological analysis. This enables us to study historical facts from the standpoint of the practical logic of the original practice with a pedagogical eye for

Psychiatrists and psychoanalytic discourse played a significant role in generating the ethnic conflicts that ignited the Balkan war of the 1990s. Interpreted and politicized by Serb psychiatrist/politicians Drs. Jovan Raškovic´ and Radovan
Karadžic´, the Balkan Oedipus became a totalizing social theory for post-socialist subjectivity. Raškovic´’s (1990) book Luda Zemlja [A Mad Country] provided psychoanalytic justification for ethnic separation and advocated Serb ‘irrational delirium’ as a liberating political force. Radovan Karadžic´ became notorious as the architect of the Bosnian genocide. The discursive construction of Balkan identity made the region particularly vulnerable to the ethno-analysis promulgated by those two
psychiatrists.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2010) 15, 20–36. doi:10.1057/pcs.2009.16

This essay examines  Slavoj Žižek’s claim that the Balkans is the unconscious of Europe.  To make such a claim is to treat the entire region as a subject with a failing Oedipal structure, which Žižek attributes to the absence of a Cartesian tradition and the proper symbolic authority. As a result of such absence, he claims, the Balkans has withdrawn into its pathological feminine substance and needs to be conquered by the language of the universal subject. The paper places Žižek’s work in the context of other versions of colonial psychoanalysis, versions that justify oppression in the name of failed Oedipalization.