From “Family Myth” to “Family Resemblances”
From “Family Myth” to “Family Resemblances”

Summary/Abstract: The question of plurality and unity in Europe, which this conference is dedicated to answering, is closely linked to the paradox of the split European subject between universal and archaic, rational and irrational, Western and Oriental, masculine and feminine. Such a scheme perceives plurality and unity as a threat to the modern subject, sees them as archaic preconditions of modernity which calls for a radical cut into this unity and its splitting between the subject and its archaic abject. Psychoanalysis is one such discourse that theorizes such a split subject as the condition of psychic normality. While such a construct may be valuable in clinical practice, when extended into the sphere of geopolitics such discourse of splitting a unitary way of life cannot proceed without violence, discriminatory splitting and exclusionary politics, to an extent that can be, as in the case of recent Balkan history, tragically criminal.

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