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

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 Zupan?i?'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.