Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
identify and analyse the narrative resources used to create and sustain
meaningful individual and collective identities, while events are constructed
or interpreted.
Before analysing in more detail the specific narratives of antagonism and
coexistence used to describe the period of growing animosity following
the death of Tito, it is important to underline the implications of the coexistence
of a double level of experience of cultural and ethnic difference:
the inter-personal, deep one and the formal, public one. The accounts of
Serbian IDPs from Kosovo provide evidence of how inter-ethnic relationships
based on codified and standardized work and neighbourly interactions
(or “civil relationships”) were more vulnerable to irruption of the
politicized discourses promoting mutually exclusive categorization along
homogeneous ethnic lines, and encouraging discrimination and abuse.
These interactions, which are ruled by codes of behaviour enforced by
existing “good practices of working comradeship and neighbourhood
courtesy”, are not through the subject’s libidinal attachment to another
subject. These kinds of inter-ethnic relations can therefore only remain
civil and respectful until politicized discourses order otherwise, since the
codes of behaviour framing them stem from a wider narcissist and collectivist
moral order. Conversely, relationships such as friendship and love
might tend to break the homogeneity of differentialist discourses and allow
for the introduction of difference and heterogeneity within and across ethnic
categories. In other words, in the case of love or friendship, the diversion
of libido from a collectivist narcissist subject to an external direct
object undermines the collective formation. Moreover, the direct libidinal
engagement of the subject with other subjects who, according to the
collectivist narcissistic formation framing his/her identity as “ethnic”, are
intrinsically different from him/her-self, has the potential to break puncture
the fantasies of unity, purity and superiority which sustain a homogenous
world. From analysis of the interviews it was clear how Serb IDPs
who had experienced such important friendships or strong neighbourly
bonds with Albanians tended to develop a more complex reading of events
that eroded the collective essentialist order promoted by (and in turn sustaining)
public normative logic.
Because of his/her dis-embeddedment from a homogeneous symbolic
order under the pressure of direct libidinal relationships, the subject both
develops and searches for pluralist heterogeneous narratives in the social
and cultural context. These then enable him to frame and understand
events in more cognitively and libidinally meaningful terms. These narratives
could therefore enable the subject to understand antagonism and
responsibility as political (rather than ethnic) differences within and across
the homogeneous categories provided by a public normative logic sus-
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