EULOGY FOR BALKAN

Abstract

This paper intends to show the significance of the specific hegemony of coded interpretations in contemporary Western cultural relation to „cultural otherness“. Rendered through West-East dichotomy, certain discursive issues of identity and difference, human and nonhuman, the phenomenon of race, nation, ethnic group, class, gender, are formulated within a polarized paradigm of Western thought. „Balkan“ is theoretically made, unmade, and remade continuously and with all the consenquences that it carries. To think of „Balkan“ is to unthink the thinking itself, to rephrase, rename, reclaim the theory and discoursive geography. Critical reading of the aspects of cultural fascination with the other, different, unknown, and foreign is based on recognition of techniques and modes of contemporary cultural environment and the cultural patterns related to the forms of marginalization and othering. Interdisciplinary approach and cross-scientific model of semiotics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, in recent science research examine the phenomenon of the alterity, in ethical, political, cultural and media domain, questioning the position of „the other“ in discourses of culture, language, body, race, nation, gender, sex and colonial subject, and in the field of the new, emergent monster theory.