Taken on par value, the fresh bad, “Orientalist” (otherwise, centered on Maria Todorova, “Balkanist” – due to the fact distinct from only application toward Balkans regarding Edward Said’s blog post-Foucauldian concept) stereotypes of your own Balkans seem to be the best you’ll be able to intellectual (and you may a symbol) providers that area. Also, as you may know from a great many other social-historical environment, “natives” are frequently happy to internalize the fresh new visitors’ (imagined) normative gaze, as long as perceptive (generally Western) traffic can see through the thin veils off care about-pleasure its darkest secret: cultural stigma. In two away from my instructions, You will find checked out the new delivery therefore the sheer reputation of ethnic stigma, mostly about Romanian analogy, using (rather broadly) Erving Goffman’s classic concepts, additionally the expanding literature towards the cumulative stigma, self-hate, self-victimization. Beyond vocal claims to the opposite, we(s) look down upon by themselves, and frequently get to the absolute bottom, the fresh “a symbol wound” from stigma: “we’re the last, the latest worst, by far the most hopeless; and we are the ones to be culpable for it”.

This “exercice mental en ce qui concerne les possibles lateraux”, to use when you look at the a slightly some other perspective Raymond Ruyer’s concept of new Utopian strategy, try ambiguous, and also the resulting gallery regarding “horizontal possibles” appear to provided human beings which were considerably more talented, way more admirable, and much more tempting compared to the mediocre, banal Westerner

Yards.Cioran, for-instance, when asking one particular vicious title matter, Review va pouvoir-with the etre Roumain? (echoing the fresh greatest occurrence inside the Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes), and therefore flipping worry about-label (second) view on the an enthusiastic ontological scandal, was also apophatically indicating the latest bad excellence out of their country. (more…)