Page 75 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 75
The Pleasure to Forbid Pleasure
The political controversies, which in former socialist countries marked a
decade before the collapse of the socialist systems and governments, shifted
from oppositions between the State and civil society to other grounds and
fields. New controversies sprang up from a process of political differentia-
tion, often mistakenly comprehended as “pluralisation”. A series of previ-
ously not divisive or unimportant signifiers from cultural order instigated
a restructuring of the political agency along with many outspoken “new”
ideologies. These processes – due to the openings and closures of plural so-
cial dialogue – made any comparisons between so-called new democracies
more complex and in many respects even irrelevant. Still, we may assume
that to quite a large extent, an obsession and fascination inside the space of
social imaginary with a notion of nation is a common feature in the major-
ity of these countries, but with quite specific consequences in different ter-
ritories. In the case of Slovenia, a public obsession with the national identi-
ty contributes to an unleashing of almost forgotten tendencies to re-define
the role of gender differences, meaning above all the place of “woman” in
a society and specifically women’s relation to sexual pleasure. An analysis
of the conservative discourse uncovers an underlying meaning in its con-
cepts of family, nation (ethnicity), sexuality, society and morality: the fe-
male pleasure – as ever, but now in a refreshed articulation – is supposed
to be destructive.
73
The political controversies, which in former socialist countries marked a
decade before the collapse of the socialist systems and governments, shifted
from oppositions between the State and civil society to other grounds and
fields. New controversies sprang up from a process of political differentia-
tion, often mistakenly comprehended as “pluralisation”. A series of previ-
ously not divisive or unimportant signifiers from cultural order instigated
a restructuring of the political agency along with many outspoken “new”
ideologies. These processes – due to the openings and closures of plural so-
cial dialogue – made any comparisons between so-called new democracies
more complex and in many respects even irrelevant. Still, we may assume
that to quite a large extent, an obsession and fascination inside the space of
social imaginary with a notion of nation is a common feature in the major-
ity of these countries, but with quite specific consequences in different ter-
ritories. In the case of Slovenia, a public obsession with the national identi-
ty contributes to an unleashing of almost forgotten tendencies to re-define
the role of gender differences, meaning above all the place of “woman” in
a society and specifically women’s relation to sexual pleasure. An analysis
of the conservative discourse uncovers an underlying meaning in its con-
cepts of family, nation (ethnicity), sexuality, society and morality: the fe-
male pleasure – as ever, but now in a refreshed articulation – is supposed
to be destructive.
73
