Subversive Affirmation

Since the 1960s, theory, the arts and political activism have increasingly rejected as insufficient the common form of “resistance by saying no”. Doesn’t a critique based on negation make itself dependent on the very system it wants to overcome? Does it not remain trapped in a thinking of oppositions?

The formulation of concepts like “subversive affirmation,” “negative affirmation”, “sham affirmation”, “affirmative overcoding”, “hyperaffirmation”, “overidentification”, “paradoxical intervention”, “symptom prescription”, “revolution of the yes”, “affirmative sabotage” and “counter-mimicry” have aimed from very different angles to develop an affirmative critique that overcomes this negation while also making us aware of the difference between conscious consent and conformity, capitulation, indifference or pragmatism.

In her new book, Sylvia Sasse explores and analyzes subversive affirmation as a critical practice in different political systems. She examines the effectiveness of such criticism and its relevance at a time when various political actors have begun appropriating subversive affirmation and no longer using it as a method of criticism.