Fascists as Much as Painters: Imagination, Overidentification, and Strategies of Intervention

Abstract

This paper explores the work of Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst collective from Slovenia, and their usage and fusion of avant-garde and fascist aesthetics as a form of cultural and political intervention into the collective imagination. This approach of adopting a set of ideas, images, or politics and attacking them, not by a direct, open or straightforward critique, but rather through a rabid and obscenely exaggerated adoption of them, is referred to as overidentification. This paper will examine the formation of overidentification as a strategy of cultural-political intervention uniquely suited to the Slovenian context. Since their interventions this approach to cultural intervention has been adopted more broadly within political organizing. The argument for such strategies is that in the current functioning of capitalism, the critical function of governance is to be more critical than the critics of governance itself. The question then becomes of how a strategy of overidentification either creates or restrains the possibility of intervening within the creation of collective imaginaries within the present. Overidentification is thus a fitting tool for developing methods of intervention for contexts marked by a high degree of ambivalence, and to find ways to recompose a politics in and against these conditions.