Stanimir Panayotov (2009) Review of Sanitary Enigma
Stanimir Panayotov (Sofia, Bulgaria, 2009)
Review of “Sanitary Enigma”
The general contribution of the book
“Sanitary Enigma” (Templum, Skopje, 2006) by Jasna Koteska amounts to the
critical psychoanalytical appraisal of Julia Kristeva’s abject theory, on the
one hand, and post-Freudian / Jungian-influenced archetypal dissection of
subject formation in light of a critique of the subject, its expansionism, and
its indoctrinating purity that runs all through the modernizing forces from the
earliest formations of subjectivity to the present right-wing backlashes
against identity politics. This theoretical-psychoanalytical critical attitude
of the subject and its attached purity is submitted to a broader philosophical
provocation which in turn may be identified as ontological research of the
human subject’s psyche and its accommodations where ideology and truth meet to
create a working space for a constructed and stable communication between real
and imaginary, i.e. aspects of the political domain that construe recent
phenomena of exclusion through certain subject identities and policies.
The latter as the domain of an ontological
and political stability is being repeatedly analyzed in a chain of interlaced
analyses all along the book’s contents with a span as wide as racial / ethnic
relations, gender-sexuality materialist oppositions and revelations, center /
periphery, as to promote more tangible approaches within the local theoretical
landscape, by way of using an interdisciplinary approach mixing at once
psychoanalysis, gender studies, film studies, literary theory, philosophy.
I.e., the theoretical investigation of the author directly touch upon the very
domains it performatively identifies as the melting pots of what constitutes
the book’s inauguration, the so-called Sanitary Era, which is the central
subject of analysis that leads the reader to the decentering of the subject in
inscribing Kristeva’s abject within the foundation of the Cartesian
understanding of what it is to be a willing, stable subject.
The theoretical and contemporary
contribution of the author lies in this inauguration of the sanitary era, which
is approached through what the author sees as “sanitary enigma,” a temporalized
and rationalized set of socio-political impositions over the subject‘s
becoming-subject. The Freudian Oedipalized onset of the dirty, downgraded
subject targeted at the female is from then on recognized as the “sanitary
source of power” and the mechanisms that construct purity as the prerequisite
for orderly social sets, which in turn constitute the civilized, non-infantile
subject. While the first part of the book discriminates the features of the
“sanitary” source of power and re-articulates psychoanalytical impediments and
prerequisites for the subject itself to become one, the second part more
autonomously researches the hierarchical and widespread purity-systems that
occupy the human psyche and thus the human bodily constitution in the pop
cultures and the reified consciousness of the present day social-political
realm. Thus, the author is trying to relate with the psyche’s own ontological foundations.
The latter is the direct gateway to the
third part of the book, where one is to meet Koteska’s own local revisionist
theory of the subject – the expansion of the subject as a neuropolitical
ontology of the present. These constitute a broader space that, on the hand,
shows the risk of inscribing the totalizing pre-ontological and thus socialized
purity of the social orders, and, on the other, hide the features of what is
the modern European foundations of the subject. To revise these prerequisites
the author uses Lacanian accounts of Freudian interpretation of the dream in
order to discern a pre-Oedipal definition of the human subject and its
Cartesian mind-body onset where the impure is gave up and rendered
unruly.
This itself makes a strong case for Koteska
as a distinct and independent theorist of the modern European subject with its
manifold, often psychoanalytically “sanitized” structures of the very
subjective existence. This individual account that is achieved at the end of
the book opens up the space for a non-naïve and rational understanding of the
"expanded subject" strongly needed for a future socio-political
reality in the Balkans and its recent and more and more rigid conceptions of
what is, for example, a recognizable legal subject, or human rights
subject.
This renders Koteska’s
psychoanalytical-philosophical contribution a focal point for a renewed and
useful subject theory that opens up spaces for rethinking end enacting the
regional and often precarious social orders in the Balkans in a
non-reductionist, post-theoretical lens. Generally, this theoretical
contribution is a direct investment in the foundations of the psychoanalytical
tradition of the philosophical concept of the Real and what structures pure
subjective spaces.
Stanimir Panayotov
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