One would be tempted to interpret the end of the wonderful book Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia as acting out on a desire that was concealed in the process of writing. In short, if love threatens nation, capitalism, and morality, then it would be better for these ideas “to no longer survive” (234). Differently put, if my ideas threaten your world, this world needs to disappear. This is in the end a message that required not only time, but delays to make its way to the reader. I cannot ask myself: what does it mean to formulate a death-wish at the end of one’s work? Is it the acceptance of a loss, a final gesture that reveals that one did not have the things (national belonging, traditional morality, capitalistic drives) that one should have had at the beginning of the journey? Is it a tragicomic act of traversing one’s fantasy? Is it a way to re-open the argument of the book, which seems to hit a dead-end, given that the hope of finding a revived queer Armenian life gradually faded away?
To begin unpacking what is at stake in the writing of the manuscript, I draw your attention to the position of the author. The story is not unlike many others, and yet each time it is very hard to put into words because it takes on the heavy burden of writing about what one holds dear. A researcher returning to a country (Armenia) that the father left to recapture the promises of a sexual revolution. An anthropologist recording the tensions in a post-Soviet society struggling with cultural debates about national and queer desire. An investigation of what is possible in a world that gradually turns Trumpian in search for an authoritarian father. The position of the author also requires an analysis of the content of the message. That is why I will focus on the book’s contradictions, which are fertile to look at, since they give us the key to what is truly important in it.
The first tightrope that the book walks on is its impossible attachment to both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian-inspired queer theory. The frame of the argument is decidedly psychoanalytic. Postsocialist Armenia is caught in a perverse predicament since the father is no longer with us and is replaced by people who fake its authority. The predicament is simply this: Armenians not only live without a fictional Master-signifier, but with surrogates that disavow their role in the national story. As such, people’s fantasies circle around the homosexual and the oligarch as figures of excess and anti-normativity. In a beautifully written chapter, “The Name of the Fathers,” we are invited to a feast. It is a surprisingly and delightful (so to speak) analysis of the obscene nicknames of the Armenian uber-rich. We find wealthy capitalists that are called “the mouse,” “the German” and the king of all criminals, the Dodi Gago, “the idiot’s son.” In the previous chapter, Tamar Shirinian explored linguistic displacements and condensations about the moral panic of economic instability, which ended up stuck on “the homosexual.” The author has talked to and spent time with queer and feminist groups and nationalist activists, as well as witnessed the firebombing and attacks on Diversity March in Erevan.
Unlike many ethnographies that I know in the vein of postsocialist research, this is a special one. It gives us a window not only into words and actions of people, but also into the fantasies of the people who were interviewed (114–16). We get to experience the delusions of right-wing nationalists, who are directly expressing in their interviews their fury and frustrations. Similarly, queer activists also take strong positions against the national mood, which encourage fascist actions and behaviors. A pervasive sense of shame and loss underline rich ethnographic descriptions with an ominous undertone. If psychoanalysis is the main frame, I had a hard time understanding why other structures, such as hysterical, obsessional, or psychotic, were not at any point contrasted with the overwhelming sense of fetishistic malaise. I understand such reluctance within a US context, which places under the category of “pathologizing” any analytic descriptions (the ultimate faux pas of any monograph!), but the force of the investigation misses strong engagement with actions that may be put under the category of “mad” or “hysterical.” This is why the imagination of the activists (222) that Shirinian draws on cannot constitute a way out of the current symbolic order (as we know from Jacques Lacan). To the contrary, imagining new worlds might be paradoxically a manner to make sure that nothing will change in the end.
The problem of perversion runs deeper than Shirinian’s book assumes. My objection does not have to do with paying respect to the right order of the three registers in Lacanian psychoanalysis (which the book explores in a Deleuzian manner as the movement of the imaginary into the symbolic). The presence of Foucault as the real “daddy” in queer studies is surprisingly erased, which, counter-intuitively, might not offer his thinking an opportunity to be truly criticized. By not facing the presence of Foucault (a perverse philosopher if there ever was one), hysterical and mad possibilities are suppressed. Not only the question of perversion, but the figures of a “perverse displacement” were at the heart of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Given that the author borrowed the inspiration out of a fetishistic implantation from Foucault’s analysis, “the lines of flight” that underpin Shirinian’s response do not function as an adequate answer. Scholars associated to the Ljubljana School (for example, Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič) have conducted an analysis of generalized perversion for many years, which provided different answers that are at odds with the final word in the book: “I wish this world would disappear” (246). My suggestion is that perhaps our theories need revising so that we can learn not to cope with the traumatic impact of the fantasies we are surrounded by. Put it in a direct way, “not coping” means abandoning the idea of the imaginary as a political solution. (I offer my critique as a scholar who also emerged out of the painful production of US academia and am aware of the dangers of deploying Lacanian ideas to a wider public. Also, I not only wrote about but also took part in similar debates and contradictions coming out of queer and feminist Romanian independent spaces regarding political action).
For example, the problem of the Symbolic has to be concentrated primarily not on how to imagine new worlds, but on the costs of paying for it in one’s life. Like in a good novel, we follow the trajectories of the people we sympathize with, such as Karen Habokyan (78–79, 90). Yet we are struck by the fact that the proliferation of perverse figures and fathers cannot be stopped simply by saying “NO” to them. “NO” might need forms of sublation that one has to pay dearly for, if one has to be accepted as part of a national symbolic existence. This is the second tightrope that the book did not venture to investigate. In this vein, it kept close to Judith Butler’s framework that an investigation of psychic life of power can lead to new forms of symbolic rules and laws, which can offer justice to queer people. My response, however, is that these attempts at symbolic institutions seem to have been thoroughly dependent on the Kantian imperative “you can, so you must.” The obverse Hegelian injunction, “you can’t, so that’s why you must” does not play a significant role in the analysis of the actors involved in the process. The logic of Bendict Anderson’s Lacanian analysis of Imagined Communities is hardly taken at face value. In this respect, nations are primarily struggles for symbolic death, which require a fight for recognition about one’s dead ancestors. This is where the book is guiding us to—I think, without articulating its message in a direct manner.
The last chapter of this captivating first monograph, “Futures without Daddy, or On Not Surviving,” is not only a warning regarding the condition of Armenian and other post-socialist countries, who face a perverse contemporaneity. It is also a warning to those who live in the United States or other “consolidated” democracies who feel that they are losing their firm grounding in an authoritarian world. Negations and imaginary forms of life are temporary solutions, but the real answer might have to require a loss that we are not yet willing to pay.
