NASILJE I SVIJEST O SOLIDARNOSTI
VIOLENCE AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SOLIDARITY

Summary/Abstract: The question whether a universal principle of solidarity is possible within cultural differences or contexts, or invariably determined in particularist fashion, by local cultural discourse, is still topical and active in moral philosophy. Here the question is posed in a restricted perspective: to what extent did the very mechanism of torture or violence create a certain consciousness of solidarity between members of the community who were excluded from the community by such torture, or even included in two different ideological projects – that of communism and that of nationalism – in the former Yugoslavia? There are two different modes of exclusion or inclusion associated with the idea of solidarity in the historical memory of inherited cultural patterns. One is based on the cannibalistic “swallowing” one’s enemies, interiorizing them, or annihilating their difference within one’s own cultural identity; the other, on “vomiting up” the digested enemy, rejecting or removing him. The question whether solidarity is something that belongs to a universal project, or whether it is invariably associated with a particularist context, in fact corresponds to a consideration of the difference between the modes of “exclusion and inclusion” in the form of torture as between communism and nationalism. In this context, it may be phrased still more specifically: on the one hand, how was the international project of communism, while creating an awareness of universal affiliation to the struggle to liberate the proletariat, marked – by means of the techniques of torture used in Goli otok, where adherents of Stalinist socialist “internationalism” were imprisoned – by a process of interiorization, inclusion or assimilation; and on the other, in what way was the ethnonationalist project that finally, in the 1990s, rent apart the Yugoslav unity by means of ethnic cleansing and the elimination and liquidation of the other and different, marked by the technique of exclusion, of “vomiting up,” of the removal of one’s own enemy?

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