Субект на една история, субект на историята: какъв е възможният изход от травмата?
Subject of a History, Subject of History: What is the Possible Escape from Trauma?

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to problematize the Bulgarian scientific discourse on identity in leaning on Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse, which proclaims a return to Freud. The article is based on the view that each collective of people functions as an individual and that, consequently, the behaviour of a group can be analyzed as if it were a single individual. The history of a people, similar to that of an individual, is presented as a series of traumatisms, which are meant to characterize it as the only history of its kind. The subject of History strives to master the traumatic events by taking the edge off them through repetition. Repetition reveals part of some subjective truth, for the trauma is not a consequence of the invasion of a tragic event in the life of an individual (of a collective) but the effect of the functioning of a phantasm, i.e. of a scenario that each subject (each collective) creates in order to conceal what is unbearable for him in his encounter with the Real. In opposition to the traditional idea of „national identity" (which perceives itself as a rounded Single Thing), we can think, together with Lacan, of some form of identification with the single trait, which has nothing in common with a circle or sphere, but is simply the line (without any contents) that, precisely for that reason, may prove to be a support for the unrealized subject of national History. The author indicates that this is a matter of symbolic identification that lay at the very beginning of the history of the Bulgarian people, although it was subsequently abandoned in favour of an identification of a purely imaginary kind.

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