Branimir Stojanovic The Case of a Belgrade Monument Dedicated to ...

Branimir Stojanovic
The Case of a Belgrade Monument Dedicated to the Victims of Wars in Ex-
Yugoslavia
Sacrificing the Victim
The ideological mechanism of the joke – there are no cannibals left in our village, we ate
the last one yesterday evening – is probably the best illustration of the state of those
contemporary European societies who have abandoned the Law and now regulate their
mutual relationships by the norm. Unlike the Law, which had its interior, exterior and
margin, the norm does neither have the interior, neither the exterior, and the subject is in
the situation never to be inside and never to be outside the norm, like in the case of the
joke about the cannibal, which lacks both exterior and interior. Everyone can eat
cannibals and be eaten as a cannibal, without breaching the prohibition to eat people,
because he who eats cannibals does not eat people.
Since the cannibal joke sees no connection between eating people and cannibalism,
eating people becomes a legalized institution of the community, in which from now on it
is possible to eat people without breaching the prohibition to eat people.
However, it is clear that this mechanism allows for an unimpeded ideological
reproduction of the cannibalistic society, in fact a meta-cannibalistic society, because he
who eats the cannibal also eats the prohibition to eat people.
In other words, the norm has now taken the place of the Law, and the Law against eating
people is no longer in effect, and the norm of the cannibal joke has come into effect
instead, giving rise to the conflict between those who eat cannibals and those who eat
people.
The paradox of the society of the norm is in fact that of pre-historical societies which had
their vehement onset during the mid 1970’s, after the death of the 20th century’s ultimate
political emancipating subject – Cultural Revolution. However, what becomes the crucial
issue of the post-historical age, the age of the norm, is the problem of memory. The posthistorical
subject, not the political subject par excellence, is completely void of all
memory and de-centered in a paradoxical fashion: at once, he has full recollection of
everything, is unable to forget, but fails to attach any memory to himself. The object that
is part of the post-historical subject’s memory must meet two important criteria: be
completely destroyed in reality and be erased without trace from the records of the
symbolic.
So, the Monument, an object of public memory in the post-historical age, becomes an
impossible object. And if it indeed exists, it commemorates oblivion rather than
remembrance. Rather, it is an object that threatens, and not an object that we can calmly

est our gaze upon and see it as a screen of memory hiding the trauma that it is supposed
to commemorate. The monument has become the trauma for itself and by itself.
What then is the only possible monument of the post-historic age The only possible
object of public memory worthy of a monument in the post-historic age is the Victim. But
what is the Victim In order to meet the standard of a monument-worthy victim, it has to
be a victim of radical Evil, as it is exemplified by the Holocaust.
The monument erected central Berlin – called the ‘Monument to the Murdered Jews of
Europe’ – is a prime example of a post-historical monument. The performative force of
this monument is reduced to a connotation that erases all historical reality, especially the
reality that created the conditions for the holocaust itself. The monument brings to mind
the sentence ‘a child was beaten’, which Freud so brilliantly analyzed for us. The place
of the enunciation, the mark of inscribing the subject of the enunciation, disappears
completely in the content of the statement. Also, we do not know who is beating the
child, we do not know when or where the child has been beaten.
And we don’t know who is making the statement. Does it come from a witness to the
beating Is it made by who is being beaten Or is it made by who is beating the child
In other words, we are in a world without borders, a world without subject and object; a
post-historical world in which the Victim, in order to be the object worthy of
remembrance, must be utterly destroyed in reality and totally erased symbolically,
inaccessible to any remembrance whatsoever.
The Belgrade monument
The case of the Belgrade monument is a failed attempt at making a post-historical
monument dedicated to the Victim. Because of its failure, it provides a conceptual
framework for a more general analysis of monuments dedicated to the Victim, the central
object of post-historical societies.
The original intention of the Belgrade city authorities was to make a monument to the
Victim after ten years of killing in the territory of former Yugoslavia, in order to distance
themselves from the decade-long bloody drama, the architect of which was the
government they were the successor of.
The intention behind erecting a monument to a victim is lost, as soon as the victim
becomes linked to a war. In this way, the authorities that announced the competition
missed the epochal conceptual framework of the Victim. By linking the Victim to the
War the jury stated that it is not dedicating the monument to Victim, because the Victim
is a Victim only if totally destroyed. War is not the same as total destruction. War is a
historical event.
The commission that was mandated to announce the competition was named the
‘Commission for the competition for the monument dedicated to the victims of the wars in

Ex Yugoslavia, 1990-1999’. This very name points at a difference between Victim in the
singular, and Victim in the plural sense. The plural Victim of war has been subjected to
heterogeneous atrocities: mass murder, ethnic cleansing, the siege of cities, rape, killing
of women, children and elderly people. On the other side, there is endless differentiation
of one state subject and its army into an unstable multitude of states of military and
paramilitary formations responsible for all those mass and individual killings.
If we say Victim, this is meant as beyond world and time. Introducing place and time to
the monument for the Victim, means in fact introducing historical time to the posthistorical
object. It tells us that this competition, behind its absolutely heterogeneous
multitude of victims, hides in fact a certain victim that the organizer of the competition
had in mind, but failed to name.
The title of the competition was re-stated, and dedicated to the ‘Memory of the victims of
the wars in ex-Yugoslavia and the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing’. Apart from the
victims of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, another two mysterious entities appear: the fallen
fighter and the victim of the NATO bombing. The initial intention to have a monument
dedicated to all the victims now suddenly becomes its opposite, since all the victims, the
multitude of people killed, are reduced to just two entities – fallen fighters and victims of
the NATO bombing. So the monument is dedicated to an inconsistent multitude: the
victims of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia and the victim of the NATO bombing, who were
not the victims of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia but rather the victims of a humanitarian war
operation of a military alliance outside the territory of the former Yugoslavia. In addition,
the fallen fighters and victims of the NATO bombing are only Serbian victims, and the
multitude of ethnic and national entities killed in the events in ex-Yugoslavia is excluded
in order to circumscribe just one national group. Adding to the confusion is the fact that
the fallen fighter is the syntagma used to identify the fallen members of the National
Liberation Movement, i.e. the fighters who, during the Second World War, defeated
National Socialism in the territory of former Yugoslavia. In fact, historically, the
denomination ‘fallen fighters’ applies exclusively to them. So, the initial intent to make a
post-historical monument to the Victim turned into its complete opposite, into an
amalgamate of various entities: those who are, historically, fifty years apart, complete
opposites, i.e. belonging to entirely different contexts.
If the organizer of the competition had wanted to remain faithful to his initial intention to
make a monument to the Victim, the monument’s name would have to be ‘Monument to
the Victim’, because any other name carries the contradictions that the wars in ex-
Yugoslavia were infested by.
The impossibility to dedicate a monument to the victims of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia
challenges the very possibility of erecting a monument in general, since any other
definition of the monument would produce the conflict to which it should be dedicated.

The case of the Belgrade monument, instead of the Monument to the Victim, became the
monument to sacrificing the victim, a naïve attempt to place a post-historical monument
in the context of historical events. Hence, the Belgrade monument raises the more general
question of the monument in the post-historical age; it points at the impossibility of the
existence of the Monument as the object of public memory.
2002-2007, Belgrade