The Bulgarian Monument to the Soviet Army: Visual Burlesque, Epic, and the Emergence of Comic Subjectivity

Abstract

Drawing on the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan, rhetorical scholars can delineate between subversive and conservative comedy—conceived not in terms of genre but as modes of subjectivity articulation that produce perspectival shifts within a given symbolic configuration—in ways that allow us to theorize, and to possibly map, the production of an active critical subject. I analyze two visual political interventions—a graffiti artwork and a 3D animated projection—onto the façade of the contested Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, Bulgaria. The interventions' rhetorical potential hinges on the dialogic deployment of subversive and conservative burlesque and of the epic. To delineate between subversive burlesque, which entails identification with rupture or the irreducible antagonism constitutive of any social-discursive formation, and conservative burlesque, for which rupture only serves to reaffirm an ideologically assured identity, I draw on Alenka Zupančič's typology of comedy. The subversive burlesque can open space for agency and social critique by short-circuiting the relationship between the universal and the particular elements in a given ideological formation, while the conservative burlesque and the epic leave that relationship intact.

Keywords:

• Burlesque
• Epic
• Irony
• Psychoanalysis
• Soviet Army Monuments

Notes

[1] Nine anonymous artists from “Destructive Creation” claimed responsibility for the intervention. They told Edno Magazine that “While the Soviet Union was in power, Bulgarians tried to be the best communists. Now … we are trying to be Americans.” For them, the Monument had lost its value and political significance and it could simply be claimed as a site for artistic expression. Edno, “Who Is in Step with the Times?,” Edno Magazine, September 14, 2011, http://edno.bg/en/blog/koy-e-v-krak-s-vremeto.

[2] Tom Parfitt, “Russia Not Amused at Red Army Statue Re-Invented as Superman and Friends,” The Guardian, Accessed June 22, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/22/russia-red-army-memorial-painted, par. 2.

[3] Ignat Ignev, Skulpturi Ot Pametnika Na Suveckata Armia Izrisuvani v Pop-Art Stil [Sculptures from the Monument to the Soviet Army Painted in Pop-Art Style], June 18, 2011, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Паметник_на_Съветската_армия_18.06.2011.jpg.

[4] Parfitt, “Russia Not Amused,” par. 4.

[5] Sofia News Agency, “2000 Enraged on Facebook Over Bulgarian ‘Vandalized’ Monument's Cleaning,” Novinite.com, June 21, 2011, http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=129482.

[6] Video recording of the event available online: 3d Projekcia “Promenyame Sofia” -Georgi Kadiev [3d Porjection “We Are Changing Sofia”—Georgi Kadiev], 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RFUuG-7wo&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

[7] Daniela Krautsack, “3D Projection Mapping and Its Impact on Media & Architecture in Contemporary and Future Urban Spaces,” Media-N 7, no. 1 (2011), http://median.s151960.gridserver.com/?page_id=482.

[8] Journalistic and scholarly publications offer little information on the animation's effectiveness. Similarly limited, the few comments to the YouTube video rehearse familiar themes (all translations are mine): lyubin4eto says that “these commies have no shame.” Julia Georgieva claims that “there were a ton of young people who genuinely clapped and cheered,” while bamby13 finds the video “Boring. Big, grandiose, suffocating boredom.” Others wonder if the government should arrest Kadiev for “desecrating” the Monument, while nik46sozo, whose comments are arguably the most hateful, writes that the metaphoric “syphilis” of “that freak, Lenin” still lives “here-and-there.” Nevertheless, the animation provides a valuable counterpoint to the rhetoric of the graffiti artwork.

[9] I use the terms “comedy” and “humor” interchangeably.

[10] Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008).

[11] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York, NY: Verso, 2008), 45.

[12] See Cheree A. Carlson, “Gandhi and the Comic Frame: ‘Ad Bellum Purificandum,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72, no. 4 (1986): 447.

[13] Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Burkean scholars have analyzed poetic categories, particularly comedy, as suasive strategies in a variety of contexts. See Beth E. Bonstetter on film; Don J. Waisanen on political comedy on nightly television shows; Gary Steven Selby and Cheree A. Carlson on social movements; Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson on social protest; Edward C. Appel on the rhetoric of civil rights leaders; and Anne Teresa Demo on the rhetoric of feminist activists.

[14] See Edward C. Appel, “Burlesque Drama as a Rhetorical Genre: The Hudibrastic Ridicule of William F. Buckley, Jr.,” Western Journal of Communication 60, no. 3 (1996): 269; Cheree A. Carlson, “Limitations on the Comic Frame: Some Witty American Women of the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 3 (1988): 310–22; Mark P. Moore, “‘The Quayle Quagmire’: Political Campaigns in the Poetic Form of Burlesque.” Western Journal of Communication 56, no. 2 (1992): 108–24. For a study of the burlesque as a negative pervasive rhetorical frame see Hubbard, Bryan. “Reassessing Truman, the Bomb, and Revisionism: The Burlesque Frame and Entelechy in the Decision to Use Atomic Weapons Against Japan.” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 3 (1998): 348–85. See also Richard P. Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932).

[15] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (New York, NY: Verso, 1985), 13, 96, 114. Jacques Lacan, Transference (1960–1961), unpublished, trans. Cormac Gallgher. In Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 41. Note Stavrakakis' discussion of the lacking subject and lacking symbolic order in Transference vis a vis Laclau and Mouffe's conception of hegemony. On rupture see Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012).

[16] See also discussions of Bakhtin and the carnivalesque: Stephen G. Olbrys, “Disciplining the Carnivalesque: Chris Farley's Exotic Dance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 240–59; M. Lane Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State,” Text and Performance Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2005): 136–55. However, we should not assume every carnivalesque transgression is empowering. See Žižek's commentary about Kristallnacht. Slavoj Žižek, afterword to Revolution at the Gates: Zizek on Lenin: The 1917 Writings, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Verso, 2011), 255. For related research on irony see Tomasz Tabako, “Irony as a Pro-Democracy Trope: Europe's Last Comic Revolution,” Controversia 5, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 23–53; Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (August 2003): 216.

[17] Alternative theories of hegemony's discursive contingency cannot adequately account for the subversive short-circuits of true comedy or for the important inversion of the demand–satisfaction relation it performs. E.g., Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York, NY: Verso, 2005); Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy. For a similar and much more exhaustive critique of Laclau see Christian Lundberg, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 2/3 (March 2012): 300. The absence of the conception of fantasy in Laclau limits his framework's explanatory power in this respect. On fantasy in Laclau see Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis. “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity 24, no. 1 (September 2008): 256–74.

[18] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 217.

[19] Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death: ‘The Passion of the Christ’ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 387–411; Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012).

[20] Barbara A. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 147–69. For analysis of Imaginary identification with a “fundamental fantasy” see Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 1 (2004): 1–23. For a friendly critique of this study with an emphasis on the Symbolic mandate governing Imaginary identification see Christian Lundberg, “The Royal Road Not Taken: Joshua Gunn's ‘Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity and Talking to the Dead’ and Lacan's Symbolic Order,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 495–500.

[21] Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rhetorical Studies and the ‘New’ Psychoanalysis: What's the Real Problem? Or Framing the Problem of the Real,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 2 (1998): 222–59.

[22] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 3.

[23] A version of this joke available from M, Maya M, “Maya's Corner: Political Jokes in Communist Bulgaria,” Maya's Corner, August 23, 2007. http://mayas-corner.blogspot.com/2007/08/political-jokes-in-communist-bulgaria.html.

[24] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 38.

[25] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 59–60.

[26] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 197.

[27] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 197.

[28] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 198.

[29] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 198.

[30] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 198.

[31] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 130.

[32] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 131.

[33] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 131.

[34] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 131

[35] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 132.

[36] Lundberg, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains,” 310.

[37] Lundberg, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains,” 300.

[38] Lundberg, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains,” 309.

[39] Slavoj Žižek, Zizek's Jokes, ed. Audun Mortensen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).

[40] Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the “Real” (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23.

[41] Žižek in “Part 1: The Matrix/The Birds,” The Pervert's Guide To Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes (London, UK: P Guide Ltd., Mount Pleasant Studios, 2006), DVD.

[42] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1976), 766.

[43] Sigmund Freud, “Humour (1927),” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 1st ed., vol. 21 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), 163.

[44] Freud, “Humour,” 166.

[45] Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002). Most twentieth century psychoanalytic literature on humor and jokes follows closely Freud's model. Martin S. Bergmann, “The Psychoanalysis of Humor and Humor in Psychoanalysis,” in Humor and Psyche: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. James W. Barron (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 20.

[46] Critchley, On Humour, 15.

[47] Critchley, On Humour, 4.

[48] Critchley, On Humour, 90.

[49] Critchley, On Humour, 11.

[50] Critchley, On Humour, 111.

[51] Burke, Attitudes Towards History, 2–5.

[52] Beth E. Bonstetter, “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film,” Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (2010): 24.

[53] Burke, Attitudes Towards History, 171. Italics in the original.

[54] Carlson, “Gandhi and the Comic Frame,” 447.

[55] Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 44.

[56] For example, President George W. Bush's media strategy included self-deprecating humor intended to portray him as a fallible human being, as “the guy next door,” yet he was at his funniest when acted “as if he really is the American president.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 33.

[57] Associated Press, “Bush Pokes Fun at Himself, Staff,” March 25, 2004, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4596717/ns/politics/t/bush-pokes-funat-himself-staff/.

[58] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 4. See also Natalija Bonic, “Psychoanalysis and Comedy: The (Im)Possibility of Changing the Socio-Symbolic Order,” S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 4 (2011): 96.

[59] Mladen Dolar, “Strel Sredi Koncerta,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Uvod v Sociologijo Glasbe (Ljubljana: Državna Založba Slovenije, 1986), 307. Quoted in Zupančič, The Odd One In, 4.

[60] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 91, italics in the original.

[61] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 15.

[62] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 15.

[63] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 16.

[64] Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 1–54. Blair's influential work on democratic commemorative practices that challenge dominant paradigms draws on Foucault's understanding of ideology as a discursive effect. Foucault's account, however, cannot fully account for agency, as it overlooks desire, the disruptive function of the Real, and the split nature of power. See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

[65] Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” 2–3.

[66] Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death,” 390.

[67] Because of its focus not on content, latent or expressed, but on articulation, my essay departs from treatments of public memory and place in the work of scholars such as Andreas Huyssen, whose take is informed by Freud's theory of the unconscious and dream-work. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). See especially p. 17.

[68] Nikolai Vukov, “Emergent Reinscriptions and Dynamics of Self-Representation Socialist Monumental Discourse in Bulgaria,” Kakainen 30, no. 3 (2006): 3. See also Hedvig Turai, “Past Unmastered: Hot and Cold Memory in Hungary,” Third Text 23, no. 1 (2009): 97–106.

[69] Dimitar Avramov, “Art or Propaganda of Bronze and Stone? About the Monuments of the Totalitarian Epoch,” Vek 21, 1992. Translation by the author.

[70] Avramov, “Art or Propaganda,” 2. Translation by the author.

[71] The Citizens' Initiative for Dismantling of the Soviet Army Monument views the landmark as a symbol of “cruel terror,” “dominance,” “violence,” “violation of national dignity,” and “the lie of the liberation of Bulgaria by the Soviet army.” “Declaration of the Initiative Committee,” Demontirane Na Pametnika Na Suveckata Armia [Dismantling of the Soviet Army Monument], accessed July 15, 2014, http://demontirane.org/устав-на-сдружението/

[72] Widespread physical preservation of communist-era monuments was likely a result of concerted efforts from the BSP and related antifascist organizations. Nikolai Vukov, “Socialist Monumental Discourse in Bulgaria,” 3–4. See also Suman Gupta, “Conceptualizing the Art of Communist Times,” Third Text 24, no. 5 (2010): 571–82; Suman Gupta and Milena Katsarska, “The Official Record and the Receptive Field: Zlatyu Boyadzhiev in Communist Times,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 79, no. 1 (2010): 1–17; Kostadine Popov, Cultural Policy in Bulgaria, Cultural Policy (Paris: UNESCO, 1972); Kostadine Popov, Cultural Policy in Bulgaria, Cultural Policy (Paris: The UNESCO Press, 1981).

[73] The road's characteristic yellow pavers were a wedding gift to Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria (1908–1918) from the Austro-Hungarian royal family.

[74] Mia Agova, “The Politics of Conservation: #ДАНСing and Romancing the Soviet Army Monument in Sofia, Bulgaria,” (master's thesis, University College London, 2013), 12, http://www.academia.edu/5385736/The_Politics_of_Conservation_ing_and_Romancing_the_Soviet_Army_Monument_in_Sofia_Bulgaria.

[75] Radost Ivanova, “‘Vsichki Zhabi Sa Zeleni, Samo Nashta E Chervena:’ Grafitite Vurhu Pametnika Na Suvetskata Armia I Mavzoleia [“‘All Frogs Are Green, Only Ours Is Red:’ The Graffiti on the Monument to the Soviet Army and the Mausoleum”], Bulgarian Ethnology 1 (1995): 73. Moreover, the painting of the statues finds an artistic predecessor in the small and short-lived, yet ideologically significant, Bulgarian Dada movement of the late '80s. Represented primarily by the intellectual circle Synthesis, the movement drew upon post-modern Western philosophy and the principles of 1920s political art, which had been a reaction against bourgeoisie ideology and its perceived escapism from the external social and political conditions of industrialized, mechanized daily life. Synthesis members understood artistic discourse as a mode of political action aimed at denaturalizing the symbolic machinery of Communist Party dogma. Vladislav Todorov called the tactic “inflammation” (vuzpalenie): language had to “inflame” the communist reality, precisely because it “is poetically worked out. Society is a poetic work, which produces metaphors, not capital.” Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 11. For other essays by Synthesis see Kiossev, Alexander, ed., Post-Theory, Games, and Discursive Resistance: The Bulgarian Case (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). See also Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva, “Spoken Revolutions: Discursive Resistance in Bulgarian Late Communist Culture,” Poetics Today 30, no. 1 (2009): 133–51. For earlier twentieth century developments in Bulgarian modern political art see S. A. Mansbach, “An Introduction to the Classical Modern Art of Bulgaria,” Art Bulletin LXXXI, no. 1 (March 1999), 155–158.

[76] Sofia News Agency, “Sofia ‘Soviet Soldiers Hoods’ Support Russia's Pussy Riot,” August 17, 2012, http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=142385

[77] Sofia New Agency, “Russia to Demand Penalties for Profanation of Soviet Army Monument in Sofia, accessed October 7, 2013, http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=153056. For information on Prague's Pink Tank, see Pavla Horáková, “The Complicated History of Prague's Tank No. 23,” Current Affairs. Radio Praha, August 5, 2005, http://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/the-complicated-history-of-pragues-tank-no-23.

[78] BBC News, “Sofia Monument Gets Ukraine Twist,” February 25, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26346901.

[79] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 137.

[80] Sofia News Agency, “Bulgaria's Sofia Municipality Fails to Decide Future of ‘Vandalized’ Soviet Monument,” Novinite.com—Sofia News Agency, June 29, 2011, http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=129753.

[81] “Declaration Regarding the Defacement of the Monument to the Soviet Army in the Center of Sofia,” June 20, 2011, http://sbj-bg.eu/index.php?t=11833. Translation by the author. Some of the undersigned organizations were created by the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1948. See also Gupta and Katsarska, “The Official Record and the Receptive Field.”

[82] Dilyana Panayotova, Stolichani “Gusha Za Gusha” Pred Izchistenia Panetnik [Sofia Residents “Grab” Each Other “By the Neck” in Front of the Cleaned-Up Monument] (News.bg, 2011), http://news.ibox.bg/material/id_805043582/tab_video/fpage_39/. Author's translation.

[83] Three cataclysmic events in Bulgaria's modern history—the Liberation from the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the first capitalist system; Bulgaria's defeat in WWII, its relegation to the Soviet sphere of influence, and the establishment of State socialism; and the collapse of socialism and the transition to a second capitalist system—have all occurred with external intervention and each has increased the influence of foreign powers. Vasil Prodanov, Teoriya Na Bulgarskia Prehod [Theory of the Bulgarian Transition] (Sofia, Bulgaria: Zaharii Stoyanov, 2012), 47. Translation by the author. After 1989, Bulgaria left one military-political bloc (the U.S.S.R.) to enter another (NATO). The strength of NATO dependency became evident in 1999, when then-Prime Minister, Ivan Kostov, offered NATO land, air, and water access to Bulgaria's neighbor, Yugoslavia. By contrast, in 2003, Turkey refused NATO forces access to its neighboring Iraq. Furthermore, despite its weak economy, Bulgaria has unconditionally supported four of America's costly wars. Prodanov, Theory of BulgarianTransition, 59–60. Bulgaria is dependent on a slew of international financial and trade organizations. Additionally, its domestic political terrain is shaped by think-tanks, funded by the USAID, George Soros's Open Society Institute, and American foreign policy and diplomacy structures (The National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the German Marshall Fund, etc.). Accession to the EU also spelled dependence of the policies from Brussels. At the same time, the country is still politically and economically dependent on Russia.

[84] Pew Research, “Confidence in Democracy and Capitalism Wanes in Former Soviet Union,” Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/12/05/confidence-in-democracy-and-capitalism-wanes-in-former-soviet-union/.

[85] U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria, Rewriting Article 1 of the Bulgarian Constitution, Making the History of 1989, accessed July 3, 2014, http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/243. See also R. J. Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 389–95.

[86] Agova, “The Politics of Conservation,” 5. Ivaylo Znepolski, “How Should We Write the History of Communist Bulgaria? [English Translation of the Foreword to The People's Republic of Bulgaria: From the Beginning to the End, 2011 (NRB: Ot Nachaloto Do Kraia. Sofia: Institute for the Study of the Recent Past.)],” Divinaation 35, no. Spring–Summer (2012): 155.

[87] Prodanov, Theory of Bulgarian Transition, 106.

[88] Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics, 1998, 203. Cited in Venelin I. Ganev, “The Dorian Grey Effect: Winners as State Breakers in Postcommunism,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 34 (2001): 3–4.

[89] Venelin I. Ganev, “Post-Communism as an Episode of State Building: A Reversed Tillyan Perspective,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38, no. 4 (2005): 432.

[90] Venelin I. Ganev, Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria After 1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 186.

[91] Multigroup's actual owner is unknown, because the company was established in 1990 in Lichtenstein where the law allows a holding to be “registered under the name of a local lawyer who is not required to disclose the name of his client.” Ganev, “Post-Communism as an Episode of State Building,” 6.

[92] Ganev, “Post-Communism as an Episode of State Building,” 5.

[93] Ganev, “Post-Communism as an Episode of State Building,” 6.

[94] Ganev, “Post-Communism as an Episode of State Building,” 8.

[95] Ganev, “Post-Communism as an Episode of State Building,” 10.

[96] James Pardew, “Bulgarian Organised Crime (C-CN5–00054) [Leaked Report, American Embassy in Sofia]” (Wikileaks, July 7, 2005), http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/07/05SOFIA1207.html.

[97] U.S. Embassy Sofia, Bulgarian Organized Crime (C-CN5–00054) [leaked Cable], Cable (July 7, 2005), 7, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/07/05SOFIA1207.html.

[98] U.S. Embassy Sofia, Bulgarian Organized Crime, 8.

[99] Image by Stanislav Genov available online: Dnevnik. “The Monument Painted Again [Pametnikut Otnovo Boyadisan],” July 13, 2013, http://www.dnevnik.bg/live/novini_ot_vas/2013/07/13/2102751_pametnikut_otnovo_boiadisan/.

[100] Alpha Research, Obstestveni Naglasi Uni 2011 [Public Attitudes June 2011] (Sofia, Bulgaria, June 2011), 5, http://alpharesearch.bg/userfiles/file/Public_opinion_AR_June_2011.pdf.

[101] Alpha Research, Obstestveni Naglasi Septemvri 2011 [Public Attitudes September 2011] (Sofia, Bulgaria, September 2011), 5, http://alpharesearch.bg/userfiles/file/Public_opinion_AR_September_2011.pdf.

[102] Ivancheva, Miariya, “The Bulgarian Wave of Protests 2012–2013,” CritCom, October 7, 2013, http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/the-bulgarian-wave-of-protests-2012–2013/#comments. See also Ivan Krastev, “Why Bulgaria's Protests Stand out in Europe,” The Guardian, July 30, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/30/bulgaria-protests-europe.

[103] The movement's name is a pun on the Bulgarian “ДАНС,” the acronym for the State Agency National Security, and its English homonym, “dance.” The movement was mobilized following attempts by the Bulgarian parliament to install as the head of DANS, which is tasked with investigating organized crime, Delyan Peevski, “a widely reviled protégé of massive criminal and media monopolies, with a history of being under investigation himself.” Maria Spirova, “Who Are the Bulgarian Protesters?,” Euronews, June 7, 2013, http://www.euronews.com/2013/07/06/who-are-the-bulgarian-protesters/. The protests were not devoid of tragedy, including several self-immolations, among them of an activist protesting the organized crime group TIM. Spiegel Online International, “Man Dies in Sixth Bulgarian Self Immolation in Less Than a Month,” Spiegel Online, March 22, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/man-dies-in-sixth-bulgarian-self-immolation-in-less-than-a-month-a-890444.html. TIM is known to have ties with Russian gas companies and organized crime. See U.S. Embassy Sofia, Bulgarian Organized Crime (C-CN5–00054) [leaked Cable], 2.

[104] Agova, “The Politics of Conservation,” iii.

[105] “Alyosha” Monuments (affectionate diminutive form of Alexei) commemorate Russian soldiers who died in WWII.

[106] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 31–33.

[107] Eisenstein and McGowan, Rupture, 21.

[108] Biliana Rilska, “Georgi Kadiev, BSP: V Momenta Sme Demode, Niamame Nuzhda ot Stanishev 2” [Georgi Kadiev, BSP: We Are Currently Out of Fashion, We Do Not Need Stanishev 2], Dnevnik, July 7, 2014, http://www.dnevnik.bg/intervju/2014/07/07/2339005_georgi_kadiev_bsp_v_momenta_sme_demode_niamame_nujda/.

[109] One of the few rhetorical studies on the epic analyses Martin Luther King's persuasive strategy of depicting himself as an epic hero in the Christian tradition. Bethany Keeley, “I May Not Get There With You: ‘I've Been to the Mountaintop’ as Epic Discourse,” Southern Journal of Communication 73, no. 4 (2008): 280–294.

[110] C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London, UK: Macmillan, 1963), 1.

[111] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 330; Keeley, “I May Not Get There With You,” 284.

[112] Eisenstein and McGowan, Rupture, 21. The logic of conservative rupture is similar to Burke's scapegoat paradigm. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1954).

[113] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 4.

[114] C. Wesley Buerkle, Michael E. Mayer, and Clark D. Olson, “Our Hero the Buffoon: Contradictory and Concurrent Burkean Framing of Arizona Governor Evan Mecham,” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 2 (2003): 191.

[115] Zupančič, The Odd One In, 24.

[116] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 17.

[117] Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 15–16.

[118] See also Burke, Attitudes Towards History, 34.

[119] It is not that ideological mystification hides some fundamental social reality (as Marx thought), but that ideology is constitutive of social reality itself. Žižek, Sublime Object, 28. At the same time, however, individuals preserve a sense of distance or “disidentification” from ideological structures. Paradoxically, this very “disidentification” is necessary for cynical ideology to continue to function [I would add, as long as the articulation between Master-Signifier and objet a remains hidden]. Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 104. Žižek describes the cynicism of contemporary subjects with Peter Sloterdijk's formula “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.” Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 1st ed. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). In other words, “[c]ynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness.” Žižek, Sublime Object, 28–30.

[120] Available from Vicove [Jokes]. Accessed September 27, 2014, from http://vicove.org/archives/9977. Author's translaiton.

[121] Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), x.

[122] Žižek, Sublime Object.

[123] Clive Leviev-Sawyer, “Bulgaria's GERB Begins Formal Negotiations on Coalition Government,” The Sofia Globe, October 13, 2014, http://sofiaglobe.com/2014/10/13/bulgarias-gerb-begins-formal-negotiations-on-coalition-government/.