According to
Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse In his essay Žižek made use of the psychoanalysis of
Jacques Lacan to argue that in its musical and artistic performance,
Laibach, a band that makes use of totalitarian-style aesthetics, was not providing an ironic imitation of official
communist state ideology, but was frustrating the system by over-identifying with its obscene
superego underside and manipulating the process of
transference with the
totalitarian state. For subversive affirmation to be effective, its address must be anonymous rather than targeted. In contrast to
film theories that give a specific
gender identification to Lacan's notion of the gaze, subversive affirmation emphasizes the inconsistency of symbolic mandates and the fact that there is no Big Other. This is why Laibach avoid both irony as well as the category of art. They also deny that what they do is intended to be subversive. Kostis Stafylakis argues that Athenian art group
FYTA's work through radical ambivalence includes examples of subversive affirmation: in their work titled 'The One Hundred Worst Greeks' they include many that would be universally agreed to be bad along with controversial choices and famous composer
Mikis Theodorakis. Žižek's psychoanalytic approach to subversive affirmation and over-identification is applied to the study of the work of
Michael Moore,
IRWIN,
The Yes Men,
Atelier Van Lieshout, and
Christoph Schlingensief in a book edited by the Dutch collective BAVO in 2007. In
Brave New Avant Garde, Marc James Léger develops Žižek's theory in relation to Lacan's concept of the
Sinthome and the Discourse of the Analyst (
Four discourses), arguing that
Social practice (art) can in some cases be understood in its connection to the
Avant-garde. Subversive affirmation is not to be confused with transgression, parody, deception or masquerade. It does not emerge from a place of
aggression or as what the French philosopher
Michel Foucault defines as a counter-discourse. In this sense Léger compares over-identification to Lacan's Discourse of the Analyst, as opposed to the Discourse of the Master or the Discourse of the Hysteric. In
Surrealism, the use of conservative trappings, for example the illusionistic forms of representation in the paintings of
René Magritte, or the Surrealists' bourgeois clothing and bureaucratic model of organization, could be thought of as antecedents to subversive affirmation. In an essay on the work of
Hans Haacke,
Fredric Jameson proposed that an art that acknowledges the logic of the image-world of
late capitalism could be characterized as homeopathic, affirming the logic of the
simulacrum to the point at which it is dialectically transformed into something else. Much like Jameson's notion of
cognitive mapping, subversive affirmation and over-identification are best conceived in terms of a critical mapping of ideology. ==References==