Bosnian conflict, it is therefore not possible simply to take sides, one can only patiently try to grasp the background of this savage spectacle, alien to our civilized system of values . . . . Yet this opposite procedure involves an ideological mystification even more cunning than the demonization of Saddam Hussein. 2
In what, precisely, consists this ideological mystification? To put it somewhat crudely, the evocation of the 'complexity of circumstances' serves to deliver us from the responsibility to act. The comfortable attitude of a distant observer, the evocation of the allegedly intricate context of religious and ethnic struggles in Balkan countries, is here to enable the West to shed its responsibility towards the Balkans -- that is, to avoid the bitter truth that, far from presenting the case of an eccentric ethnic conflict, the Bosnian war is a direct result of the West's failure to grasp the political dynamic of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, of the West's silent support of 'ethnic cleansing'.
In the domain of theory, we encounter a homologous reversal apropos of the 'deconstructionist' problematization of the notion of the subject's guilt and personal responsibility. The notion of a subject morally and criminally fully 'responsible' for his acts clearly serves the ideological need to conceal the intricate, always-already operative texture of historico-discursive presuppositions that not only provide the context for the subject's act but also define in advance the co-ordinates of its meaning: the system can function only if the cause of its malfunction can be located in the responsible subject's 'guilt'. One of the commonplaces of the leftist criticism of law is that the attribution of personal responsibility and guilt relieves us of the task of probing into the concrete circumstances of the act in question. Suffice it to recall the moral-majority practice of attributing a moral qualification to the higher crime rate among African Americans ('criminal dispositions', 'moral insensitivity', etc.): this attribution precludes any analysis of the concrete ideological, political and economic conditions of African Americans.
Is not this logic of 'putting the blame on the circumstances' however, taken to its extremes, self-defeating in so far as it necessarily leads to the unforgettable -- and no less ideological -- cynicism of Brecht's famous lines from his Threepenny Opera: 'Wir wären gut anstatt so roh, doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so!' ('We would be good instead of being so rude, if only the circumstances were not of this kind')? In other words, are we, the speaking subjects, not always-already engaged in recounting the circumstances that predetermine the space of our activity?
A more concrete example of the same undecidable ambiguity is
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