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On the Heroisms of Today

Panos Kompatsiaris

To cite this article: Panos Kompatsiaris (2019): On the Heroisms of Today, Third Text, DOI:
10.1080/09528822.2019.1628447

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Still from Natasha A Kelly,
Milli’s Awakening (detail),
2018, courtesy of the artist
1 Michel Foucault, The Ηistory
of Sexuality: An
Introduction, Vol 1, Robert
Hurley, trans, Vintage,
New York, 1980; see, for
example, Chantal Mouffe,
Agonistics: Thinking the
World Politically, London,
Verso, 2013 and Okwui
Enwezor, ‘Mega-exhibitions
and the Antinomies of a
Transnational Global Form’,
in Elena Filipovic, Marieke
van Hal and Solveig
Øvstebø, eds, The Biennial
Reader, Hatje Cantz, Bergen,
2010, pp 426–445; see
Gerald Raunig, ‘Instituent
Practices: Fleeing, Instituting,
Transforming’, in Gerald
Raunig and Gene Ray, eds,
Art and Contemporary
Critical Practice:
Reinventing Institutional
Critique, MayFly, London,
2009, pp 3–11
2 See also Benjamin Noys,
Persistence of the Negative:
A Critique of Contemporary
Continental Theory,
Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 2010
Third Text, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1628447
On the Heroisms of Today
Experience, Memory and Risk as
Anti-fascist Politics in Contemporary Art
Panos Kompatsiaris
According to a typical reproach coming from insiders and outsiders alike,
political art is not only ineffective but hypocritical; its declarations against
injustice, oppression and capitalist governance operate within a system
that reproduces and legitimises the political and economic powers that
enable these arrangements in the first place. This reproach is regularly
rebutted by critical art intellectuals through recourse to post-Marxist
theory and terms such as performativity, contingency, potentiality or,
most commonly, disruption. To use a common line of reasoning, political
art may be complicit with power but is supposed to ‘perform resistance
from within’, to ‘open up a space of potentiality’ or to ‘temporarily
disrupt’ race, gender and class normativities. The Foucault-inspired idea
that power is everywhere and thus resistance can happen anywhere,
Chantal Mouffe’s proposal of counter-hegemonic or ‘agonistic’ occu-
pations of art institutions, or the Deleuzian concept of the institution as
a type of scaffolding that traverses hierarchies of power add further theor-
etical credibility to this point of view.1 By alluding to the redundancy of
gestures of negation,2 this strategy of moderation and compromise has
contributed to modest victories within liberal democracies, providing at
the same time an excuse for left-wing intellectuals to work with spectacu-
lar institutions.3 However, the rise of explicitly far-right or neo-fascist ten-
dencies in today’s world is challenging the uncontested efficacy of
affirmation from an emancipatory point of view.4
Moving beyond affirmative moderation, this article draws on recent
art practices to think through modalities of oppositional intransigence
and disaffirmation as means to achieving political ends, including
negation, zealotry, heroism and sacrifice.5 At least since the early 1990s,
with the rise of new feminist and queer epistemologies, these modalities
© 2019 Third Text

3 Russell Jacoby makes a
similar argument about the
incorporation of left-wing
radical intellectuals by the
university tenure system. See
Russell Jacoby, The Last
Intellectuals: American
Culture in the Age of
Academe, Basic, New York,
2000.
4 And it does so not only
through tackling the
question of ethical tension
between spectacle and
critique, resulting in patterns
of complicity and ‘guilt’ (ie
when critique becomes a
career vehicle) but through
its effectiveness as a strategy
of resistance. For more on
critical curatorial ‘guilt’, see
Panos Kompatsiaris, The
Politics of Contemporary Art
Biennials: Spectacles of
Critique, Theory and Art,
New York, Routledge, 2017,
pp 33–39.
5 For a relevant approach, see
Joel Olson, ‘The Freshness of
Fanaticism: The Abolitionist
Defense of
Zealotry’, Perspectives on
Politics, vol 5, no 4, 2007, pp
685–701; Joel Olson,
‘Rethinking the
Unreasonable Act’, Theory
& Event , vol 17, no 2 ,
2014, https://muse.jhu.edu/,
accessed 11 February 2019;
George Ciccariello-Maher,
‘Decolonizing
Fanaticism’, Theory &
Event , vol 17, no 2, 2014,
https://muse.jhu.edu/,
accessed 11 February 2019;
Alberto
Toscano, Fanaticism: On the
Uses of an Idea, London,
Verso, 2017; Alberto
Toscano, ‘The
Uncompromising Classes’,
Theory & Event, vol 17, no
2, 2014, https://muse.jhu.
edu/, accessed 11 February
2019; Benjamin Noys,
Persistence of the Negative:
A Critique of Contemporary
Continental Theory,
Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 2010.
6 Indicatively, see Alexis
Shotwell, Against Purity:
Living Ethically in
Compromised Times,
University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2016.
3
have been largely viewed with distrust in cultural and critical theory for
allegedly reproducing epic, pure and fixed identities, certainties or grand
narratives.6 The title of the latest, at the time of writing, Berlin Biennale,
‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ (2018) is a good example, exposing the
essentially anti-heroic sentiment of the so‐called socially engaged art of
today. In the curatorial statement, the heroic act is associated with a sus-
piciously viewed ‘coherency’, a ‘desire for saviours’ or, even worse, with
‘toxic subjectivities’.7 Yet, as this article will discuss, intransigence and
the construction of sacrificial lifestyles or heroic representations was and
will be part of any struggle for social equality in which individuals or col-
lectives put their lives and well-being at risk so as to construct a better
future. To simply see this act as regressive would miss the fact that
fascism, racism, patriarchy and capitalism are themselves grand narra-
tives, supported materially by enormously powerful institutions and
industrial, military and carceral complexes.
In the same manner, the prospects of emancipatory anti-fascism can
hardly afford to neglect a politics of intransigence in favour of only pro-
moting soft, small-scale interventions against the ‘new brutality’ of
today.8 For Enzo Traverso, the ascent of extreme right-wing politics, or
‘post-fascism’, is organically linked to a ‘historical fascist matrix’ – that
is to say, the ideological legacy of the racial-imperial Eurocentrism of
the fascist and Nazi parties of the twentieth century.9 This enables the
mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with historical fascism, including
discourses on anti-immigration, Islamophobia, white supremacism, bio-
logical essentialism, nationalist construction of histories and traditionalist
or explicitly patriarchal gender roles. We can see, for instance, how right-
wing media personas, ranging from the Canadian psychologist Jordan
Peterson to the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin and proto-fascist
celebrity figures, such as the American Trump supporter Milo Yiannopou-
los, become part of a global popular culture that legitimises adjacent
worldviews. As this article sets out to argue, the ascent of extreme right-
wing politics and epistemologies in which the formats of the detention
centre and the camp are its main spatial arrangements is a reminder of
the inescapability of involving intransigent and uncompromising modal-
ities for constructing anti-fascist oppositional politics.
In the first part of the article I explore a politics of intransigence
through the idea of fanatical opposition under conditions of total domina-
tion, in which the question of how to stand up against power and injustice
is pushed to its limits.10 This is not simply to cast the current ascent of the
extreme right’s ‘fascist matrix’ as a case of total domination, but to specu-
latively produce a valid scenario for its future resistance. Speaking about
the nineteenth-century American abolitionists, American theorist Joel
Olson argues that its fanatical branch publicly portrayed the regime of
slavery in such extreme (for the time) terms. But this had to take place pre-
cisely by denouncing a moderate position as being complicit with the
already existing state of things.11 For Olson then, zealotry refers to the
‘extraordinary political mobilization of the refusal to compromise’,12
and the fanatic is the one who seeks to mobilise ‘populations in defense
of a particular position by dividing the public sphere into friends…
and enemies… and pressuring the moderates in between’.13 From this
perspective, the fanatic, and especially the anti-colonial fanatic, as we
shall see with Frantz Fanon, is not simply someone who is backwards in
4

Still from Natasha A Kelly, Milli’s Awakening, 2018, courtesy of the artist

For how the rise of an
ironic relatedness towards
the anti-fascist heroic gave
way to a technocratic
culture of ‘anything goes’
in France in the 1970s, see
Michel Foucault, Pascal
Bonitzer and Serge
Toubiana, ‘Anti-retro’, in
David Wilson, ed, Cahiers
du Cinéma: Volume Four,
London and New York,
Routledge, 2000, pp 159–
172.
7 Gabi Ngcobo, We Don’t
Need Another Hero, KW,
Berlin, 2018, pp 15–18
8 Rosi Braidotti, Timotheus
Vermeulen, Julieta Aranda,
Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen
Squibb and Anton Vidokle,
‘Editorial—The New
Brutality’, eflux journal 83,
June 2017, https://www.e-
flux.com/journal/83/142721/
editorial-the-new-brutality ,
accessed 10 January 2019
9 Enzo Traverso and Sonya
Faure, ‘‘The Left is a History
of Defeats’: An Interview
with Enzo Traverso’, Verso
Blog, 31 January 2017,
https://www.versobooks.
com/blogs/3077-the-left-is-a-
history-of-defeats-an-
interview-with-enzo-
traverso, accessed 5
December 2018
10 Howard Caygill, On
Resistance: A Philosophy of
Defiance, A&C Black,
London, 2013
11 Olson, The Freshness of
Fanaticism, op cit, p 689
12 Olson, Rethinking the
Unreasonable Act, op cit,
para 7
13 Olson, The Freshness of
Fanaticism, op cit, p 685
14 Enzo Traverso, Left-wing
Melancholia: Marxism,
History, and Memory,
New York, Columbia
University Press, 2016.
Traverso borrows the
phrase from Walter
Benjamin, who coined it in
1931 in an essay by the
same title: Walter
Benjamin, ‘Left-Wing
Melancholy (On Erich
Kästner’s New Book of
Poems)’ [1931], Screen, vol
15, no 2, 1974, pp 28–32.
5
their thinking or close-minded but a figure advancing uncompromising
views in support of particular causes and ideals.
Based on the above discussion, I look at the three modalities of a poli-
tics of intransigence – namely, heroism, sacrifice and risk – through the
recent works of contemporary artists, including Natasha A Kelly, Mary
Zygouri and Pyotr Pavlensky, who respectively express, as we shall see,
a politics of experience, a politics of affective memory, and a politics of
parrhesia. More particularly, I look at how Kelly’s film Mili’s Awakening
(2018) constructs the female Afro-German experience against normalised
whiteness, how Zygouri’s community project Round-Up (2017) performs
Greek anti-Nazi martyrdom, and how Pavlensky’s performances The
Threat (2016) and Lighting (2017) self-sacrificially oppose powerful insti-
tutions, from governments to banks in Russia and France. These works
shape constellations of the heroic both outside (Pavlensky) as well as
within (Kelly, Zygouri) official artworld channels – that is to say, in a plur-
ality of sites – irrespective of whether these sites embrace or disavow
heroic politics. By ‘constellation of the heroic’ (rather than the hero as a
stable and monolithic category), I mean the varying emotional investments
and re/arrangements of meaning around figures of unwavering opposi-
tion, unfolding temporarily and in shifting intensities in dynamic settings,
materialities and spheres. Furthermore, I would argue that these works
oppose what Traverso elsewhere calls ‘left-wing melancholia’14 and
assemble (rather than merely reflect or ironically subvert) figures of intran-
sigence by conversing with a post-Occupy ethos, which is itself grounded
in a division of the social space into two antagonistic poles: the 99% and
the 1%.15 A similar questioning of participation and engagement as inher-
ently positive gestures has been going on in contemporary art for the last
few years, seeing refusal, boycotting and political commitment as valid
political strategies.16 Finally, most of these works (as well as the works
of other contemporary artists who work with the concept of the
‘people’, such as Mark McGowan or Artur Zmijewski) aim to evoke
emotional reactions in the viewers that force them to choose sides,
placing the ‘ethical’ (sense of moral duty, sincerity and responsibility) at
the centre of aesthetic experimentation.17 They can then be seen as part
of a larger, often contradictory, tendency of ‘new sincerity’ that goes
beyond self-reflective irony, mobilising terms such as ‘soul’ and ‘tear’,
which have always ‘preserved a prominent place in popular culture’, but
are viewed suspiciously by highbrow postmodernists.18
Mad Courage, Total Domination and
the Militant Fanatic
If 10 guys think it’s ok to hang with 1 Nazi then they just became
11 Nazis.
Chris Rock19
In a section of his book On Resistance, the political theorist Howard
Caygill grapples with strategies of resistance under conditions of total
domination. For Caygill, the question of resistance maintains a ‘particular
gravity’ under these conditions, as the ones who set out to resist need to
6
15 Jodi Dean, ‘Claiming
Division, Naming a
Wrong’, Theory & Event,
vol 14, no 4, 2011, https://
muse.jhu.edu/, accessed 8
July 2018
16 Joanna Warsza, ed, I Can’t
Work Like This: A Reader
on Recent Boycotts and
Contemporary Art,
Sternberg Press, Berlin,
2017; see David Beech,
‘Notes on the Art Boycott’,
in Warsza, op cit, pp 13–22
17 For a relevant discussion on
Mark McGowan, see Panos
Kompatsiaris,
‘Contemporary Art and
Left-wing Populism: The
Artist Taxi Driver as
Working Class Ideology’,
Journal of Visual Art
Practice, vol 17, no 1, 2018,
pp 67–80.
18 Ellen Rutten, Sincerity after
Communism: A Cultural
History, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 2017,
p13
19 The tweet can be found at
the following address:
https://twitter.com/
chrisrock/status/
897593239703834626?
lang=en , accessed 30
January 2019.
20 Caygill, On Resistance, op
cit, p 140
21 Ibid, p 145
22 Olson, The Freshness of
Fanaticism, op cit, pp 687–
688
23 Ibid, p 686
24 Ibid
25 Ibid
not only to consider questions of effectiveness but ask ‘what possibilities
are available for resisting repressive political regimes that invest enormous
organisational and incarceral energies in resisting resistance?’20 Insofar as
a regime puts its energies into eliminating or incorporating any resistance
against it, questions around oppositional politics need to be directed first
and foremost at sabotaging this regime. The characterisation of a con-
dition as total domination is often contingent, however; fascist regimes
or even slavery were not seen at the time as total domination by many,
or were pseudo-scientifically justified by their proponents as ‘natural
facts’. A regime of total domination – one, for example, that leaves no
space for manoeuvre for the populations it controls – has to be first articu-
lated as such by the actors opposing it. Today, one can think of several
possible conditions in which this attribution could be given, even
beyond the – strictly speaking – discourse of humanism (eg animal
farming or AI control). Fascism, as an ideological and historical construct,
refers to such a condition and the historically specific fascist matrix of
today can enable what Caygill, via Walter Benjamin, calls a ‘sense of
danger’:21 a moment in which one should decide to act in an uncompro-
mising way before domination becomes all-encompassing. Under these
conditions, the opponent against which resistance is directed becomes
clearer, and the dividing line between the enemy and the friend sharper.
This Manichean division of the social space between enemies and
friends implies that the figures putting forward this division are character-
ised by an idealistic commitment to their ideals. To use the case of the anti-
fascist militant, the historical and contemporary incarnations of fascism
would be a clear enemy against which concessions cannot be made.
Joel Olson’s approach to fanaticism and zealotry is helpful for the case
at hand, and paradigmatic in its effort to unhinge these terms from their
dominant pejorative or totalitarian connotations, re/placing them within
the radical democratic tradition. Olson refers to a dominant rhetorical
conception propagated by Enlightenment thinkers according to which
virtue equals ethical balance, vice equals immoderation, and zealotry
and fanaticism are at once ‘against reason’, ‘against tolerance’, ‘funda-
mentalist’ and ‘terrorist’.22 Olson’s work primarily focuses on the Amer-
ican abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century, and in particular on
the Garrisonian wing of the movement, which was a wing ‘of self-defined
fanatics with an unyielding commitment to the immediate and uncondi-
tional emancipation of the enslaved’.23 Slavery, in their view, was a con-
dition of total domination, an absolute violation, the rejection of which
should be proclaimed no matter what. The abolitionists employed ‘extre-
mist’ tactics that involved breaking up church services, publicly disavow-
ing the US Constitution, and defying laws that enforced racial
segregation.24 These practices were indeed extreme for the time and
their perpetrators denounced by the establishment as ‘pestiferous
fanatics’, ‘designing demagogues’ and ‘irresponsible revolutionaries’.25
Yet, the ideals these fanatics were fighting for were deeply democratic
rather than simply close-minded or backward:
They defended the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, fought
against racial discrimination, advocated for women’s rights, and
condemned the exploitation of industrial workers. Garrisonians
championed free speech, welcomed African Americans and white women

26 Ibid
27 Toscano, The Freshness of
Fanaticism, op cit, p 102
28 Olson, The Freshness of
Fanaticism, op cit, p 688
29 Ibid, pp 688–689
30 Caygill, On Resistance, op
cit, p 139
31 Toscano, The Freshness of
Fanaticism, op cit, p 250
32 Ibid, p xi, p 249
33 Ibid, p xi
34 Vivian Gornick, Emma
Goldman: Revolution as a
Way of Life, Yale
University Press, New
Haven, 2011, p 84
35 The idea of deliberative
exchange here refers to the
Habermas conception of
public sphere in which the
process of rational
deliberation would
hopefully advance more
equal futures.
36 Ciccariello-Maher,
Decolonizing Fanaticism,
op cit, para 12
7
into their organizations, and developed new participatory practices in
public meetings. Their zeal for the antislavery cause reflected their commit-
ment to democracy; in turn, their democratic beliefs inspired fanatical
opposition to enslavement and racism.26
Rather than merely evil, or ‘superstition in action’,27 fanaticism is then just
another strategy for hegemony that can be ‘used to win political struggles’,
a strategy that is ‘neither inherently democratic or undemocratic’.28 This
strategy, for Olson, would divide the social space into two opposing
camps with no middle-ground: either the abolitionist friends or the pro-
slavery enemies. In Olson’s terms, zealotry is a ‘political activity driven
by an ardent devotion to a cause’ that progresses this sharp division so
as to ‘win as many moderates as possible and to push the rest into the
enemy camp in order to clear the way for a final showdown’.29 The
fanatic can be anything from Jihadist to vegan, from feminist to
working class, from anti-nuclear to, here, anti-fascist.
Caygill conceives resistance in conditions of total domination as
having ‘transcendental aims’ – aims that would exceed the material and
pragmatic world of possibility and move towards the unrealisable.30
Alberto Toscano expands both Caygill’s and Olson’s thought by conceiv-
ing fanaticism ‘under the politics of abstraction, universality and partisan-
ship’ – that is, under the practice of sticking to a political ideal and
pursuing a politics attached to it, turning possibly a blind eye to any con-
tradictions that this attachment may engender.31 The fanatic displays an
‘enthusiasm for the abstract’,32 which, for Toscano quoting Hegel, is
what ‘separates the fanatic from the mere madman’.33 The sticking to
an abstract ideal may then involve a degree of irrational attachment,
which, as Olson points out in relation to the American abolitionists, is a
rationality in itself. Yet it is an excessive and non-moderate rationality
that transcends or even actively overlooks the inconsistencies of the
ideal vis-à-vis the empirical. In her biography of anarchist and writer
Emma Goldman, Vivian Gornick names this rejection of the claim of
experience ‘as superior to that of idealism’, as ‘mad courage’, which con-
sists of the activity of going on and ‘insisting, against all odds, that ulti-
mately the ideal will work because it must work, because it is not
acceptable that it not work’.34 The fanatic is essentially this figure of
‘mad courage’, the figure who would reject the pragmatic possibilities or
contradictions that the empirical world reveals and would set out to
fulfil an abstract ideal at the cost of avoiding self-reflection, introspection
or deliberative exchange.35
The figures of the zealot and fanatic, and the dialectical dichotomy
between rationality and irrationality they harbour, take a particular
shape in the context of decolonial politics. Ciccariello-Maher productively
tracks this divide in the course of Fanon’s writing and biography. While
Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks was not, in principle, supportive of
fanaticism and enthusiasm as anti-colonial modalities (‘his initial
approach to the world was universal, rationalist and existential’),36 he
was essentially forced to anti-colonial fanaticism when faced with the
impossibility of argumentation against colonial reasoning. A deliberative
exchange between Fanon and the proponents of colonial reasoning
would be impossible, since between him and the white other, as
Ciccariello-Maher explains, ‘there was a difference in kind, an ontological
8
37 Ibid
38 Ibid, para 47
39 Caygill, On Resistance, op
cit, p 101
40 Ciccariello-Maher,
Decolonizing Fanaticism,
op cit, para 47
41 Jo Littler, Against
Meritocracy: Culture,
Power and Myths of
Mobility, Routledge,
London, 2017
42 Joe Hill is a union song
referring to the Swedish-
American unionist and
prominent labour activist
who was executed in 1915
in Salt Lake City on
fabricated charges. His life
and death inspired working
people across the world and
the song Joe Hill has been
sung by different high-
profile artists, including
Paul Robeson and Joan
Baez.
43 Franco Berardi, Heroes:
Mass Murder and Suicide,
Verso, London, 2015
44 Sibylle Scheipers,
‘Introduction: Toward
Post-Heroic Warfare?’, in
Sibylle Scheipers, ed,
Heroism and the Changing
Character of War, London,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,
pp 1–18
45 Ibid, pp 1–7
46 Ibid, pp 16–18
47 Berardi, Heroes, op cit, pp
5–6
48 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched
of the Screen, Berlin,
Sternberg Press, 2012, p 46
49 In an even more
condemning manner, Boris
Groys equates the politics
and aesthetics of the heroic
with totalitarian regimes,
including Hitler and Italian
fascism. Yet Groys’s
account of heroic politics as
being equated with the
perfection of the body, and
Hitler’s ‘heroic teaching
regarding the value of
blood, race, and
personality’ is delimiting
the debate, refraining from
taking into account ‘heroic’
qualities (individual and
collective sacrifice,
“flaw” that prevented [recognition]’.37 In other words, fanaticism for
Fanon and the anti-colonial fighters was not their principal choice but
‘was instead imposed as an inescapable curse’38 in ‘a world of alien-
ation… created by colonial violence’;39 that is to say, for ‘Fanon as for
the Algerian revolutionaries and so many millions of other damnés de la
terre, [fanaticism was] not a choice but a condemnation’.40 The delibera-
tive model then, upon which bourgeois democracy is based, presupposes
the existence of a public sphere of equal participation, which, in the
context of anti-colonial struggles, is absent. While in colonial settings or
slavery the conditions of domination are extreme, the neoliberal regimes
of today, with their war machines and detention camps, can be equally
debated on these grounds; to simply reject any fanatical politics would
mean to endorse the capitalist fallacy of meritocracy and equal opportu-
nity.41 Again, rather than a priori condemning the fanatic, the proper
questions to ask are under what conditions someone becomes a fanatic
and which causes and politics they progress.
Heroes, Sacrifice and Parrhesia
The copper bosses killed you, Joe
They shot you, Joe, says I
Takes more than guns to kill a man
Says Joe, I didn’t die.
Joe Hill (song)42
The stereotypical image of the hero refers to a determined, unwavering
and robust actuality (usually male) that expels ambiguity and fragility
and moves beyond the contradictions of life in a seemingly straightfor-
ward way.43 Harbouring a multiplicity of identities that in the end are
all one, the hero is at once a revolutionary and anti-conformist who sacri-
fices pleasures (in some cases even leading an ascetic lifestyle) and even
risks her or his life for a cause.44 It is argued that liberal democracies of
the post-1990s, when capitalism assumes a global form, navigate in a
‘post-heroic condition’.45 The sacrificial act, the hero’s main performance,
is dismissed through recourse to individualised and calculative cost-benefit
frameworks. In more macro-sociological (and eschatological) terms, the
postmodern world is unable to inspire values for which one would be pre-
pared to die.46 In Franco Berardi’s melancholic and defeatist account, it is
the dominance of simulation brought about by information technologies
that render the hero obsolete. The Hollywood or the video-game hero
replace once and for all the meaning and effectivity of the flesh-and-
blood heroic deed.47 For Hito Steyerl, in her equally fatalistic account,
the end of heroism has a specific date: that of 1977, related to the disinte-
gration of the militant German organisation RAF and the release of anti-
heroic pop songs by David Bowie and The Stranglers.48 The heroes lost all
their credibility, there can be no return to the heroic any more as a means
to inspire people towards a cause.49
Despite these sweeping dismissals of the hero, heroic constellations
composed by individuals or collectives prepared to risk their comfort and
even life so as to promote anti-fascist politics, are not only – normatively
speaking – necessary but also present in our current post-digital space.
 9

Mary Zygouri, Round-Up, 2017, courtesy of the artist

10
commitment to an ideal,
fidelity to the cause)
employed to counter these
very totalitarianisms by
partisans and anti-fascists.
See Boris Groys, Art Power,
The MIT Press, Cambridge
Massachusetts, 2008.
50 On the trial, which
continues as this article is
going to press, see Patrick
Strickland, ‘Greek
prosecutors say Golden
Dawn ‘stalling’ as trial
drags on’, Al Jazeera, 12
October 2018, https://
www.aljazeera.com/news/
2018/10/greek-prosecutors-
golden-dawn-stalling-trial-
drags-181012123009018.
html, accessed 7 January
2019.
51 Speaking about the
effectiveness of heroic and
self-sacrificial acts, one has
to recall the tremendous
influence exerted by diverse
‘heroic’ figures ranging
from Rosa Parks and Rosa
Luxemburg to the
volunteers fighting in
Rojava and killed in Afrin,
and from the Cuban
revolutionary José Julián
Martí to the anti-colonial
leader Patrice Lumumba
and Edward Snowden. In
bourgeois-psychologicist
approaches, these figures
may be pathologised (eg
Lumumba’s depiction by
the CIA as megalomaniac
or opportunistic), but from
the perspective of social
equality they are figures
whose ideals correspond
with their way of life,
forged in and through
struggles for more equal
futures. See Emmanuel
Gerad and Bruce Kuklick,
Death in the Congo:
Murdering Patrice
Lumumba, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts,
2015, p 58.
52 Of course, for Fyssas’s
martyrdom to be
recognised as ‘heroic’ and
subsequently inspire the
Greek population into anti-
fascist action, several
identifications had to come
into play: he was of Greek
rather than of migrant
ethnic background, he was
One can think of the Greek anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, murdered by
neo-Nazi thugs in September 2013, aged 35. Fyssas was a hero, understood
in the terms above, who was killed for his beliefs by a member of the neo-
Nazi party Golden Dawn during a late-night organised pogrom against
anti-fascists in a working-class district of the Greek capital. Fyssas’s martyr-
dom triggered a heroic constellation, including an unprecedented wave of
anti-fascist protests in Greece, to the point that the right-wing government
of the time was forced to press charges and imprison the, by then seemingly
invincible, neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.50 In other words, Fyssas’s dedica-
tion to the cause of anti-fascist struggle inspired people, enabling them to
take sides.51 Contrary to defeatist accounts, the flesh-and-blood anti-
fascist hero here expresses an intransigent actuality, standing firmly and
self-sacrificially against fascist politics and its contemporary matrixes; an
actuality whose heroic qualities are forged in and through social struggle
rather than being pre-determined or quasi divine.52
Let us, however, see how the figure of the hero is negotiated rather than
simply repudiated or ironically subverted in diverse ways through recent,
post-Occupy contemporary artworks. The first two works that I look at
(Kelly, Zygouri) are placed within art institutions, while the third (Pav-
lensky) is outside them. Through evoking the inside/outside binary, we
thus navigate the heroic in its spatial multiplicity, as it emerges both
within artistic sites that customarily repudiate it in favour of a politics
of moderation (spectacular exhibitions) and in sites that more openly
embrace it (the ‘streets’).
As mentioned above, the tenth, and latest, edition of the Berlin Biennale
employed a title apposite to our discussion: ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’.
In her curatorial statement, Gabi Ngcobo describes heroism as something
to be strictly avoided, implying a possibly monolithic attachment and fide-
lity to some ideal that goes unquestioned. Rather, Ngcobo – as is common
in curatorial statements of such shows – privileges open-endedness and an
introspective approach. Given, however, the Biennale’s focus on the black
female experience in colonial settings and the discussion on decolonial
resistance above, one would imagine a different take on the issue – at
least rhetorically. How can colonial racism and patriarchy, notions to
which Ngcobo alludes as being constitutive in shaping and othering the
female African body, be approached deliberately and introspectively as
issues to be negotiated in a civil manner as if between equals?
Despite the moderate rhetoric, at least one of the Biennale’s works
stuck to a version of intransigent politics via the voice of several Afro-
German figures. In a self-proclaimed anti-heroic Biennale, the video of
Natasha A Kelly, Milli’s Awakening (2018) offers a portrait of seven
Black German female artists whose narratives reveal qualities of determi-
nation and idealistic firmness, while they cast their oppressed experience
as a vehicle for reaching the transcendental (universal equality).
These qualities, as we learn from the film, are attained through everyday
encounters with normalised whiteness in Germany and struggles to trans-
cend it. The title of the piece refers to the painting Sleeping Milli, made in
Dresden by the German painter Ludwig Kirchner around 1910 and repre-
senting a naked black woman lying on a sofa, apparently sleeping. The
recumbent woman has no palpable facial and bodily characteristics, and
her outline is objectified to the point that it seems entirely destined for
the consumption of the male European gaze.

young rather than old, he
came from a working-class
rather than privileged
background and he was a
creative producer
(musician/lyricist) rather
than an ‘ordinary’ office
worker or manual labourer.
Despite however, this whirl
of coincidences (that
themselves have a lot to say
about which identifications
successfully mobilise),
Fyssas’s heroic actuality did
manage to activate the
population into an anti-
fascist cause. By doing that,
the hero, on this occasion, is
neither some saviour from
beyond this world for
whom the oppressed
patiently waited, nor a kind
of thirsty-for-power
manipulator, but simply a
person standing firmly for
their beliefs and being
prepared to take the risk of
being lethally attacked.
53 Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Feminism
without Borders:
Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity, Duke
University Press, Durham,
North Carolina, 2003, p 7
54 Ibid, p 106
55 Documenta 14 was itself
perceived by its critics as a
kind of ‘artwashing’ of the
German-led austerity in
Greece.
56 Additionally, 8,000 men
were taken as hostages to a
nearby camp and hundreds
of their houses were looted.
11
The title of the piece, then, already refers to a courageous gesture, that
of ‘awakening’, which here becomes an allegory for Afro-German female
emancipation, a gesture of withdrawing from a given inferior role as well
as crafting pathways of lived resistance. Echoing Kelly’s work and
drawing on Fanon, Chandra Talpade Mohanty speaks of decolonial fem-
inism as a process of ‘active withdrawal of consent’ as well as ‘resistance to
structures of psychic and social domination’ anchored in intersectional
Third World women’s feminist politics.53 The careful disidentifications
that these women perform from dominant roles sustain what Mohanty
calls a ‘politics of experience’, which particularises oppressed feminist
struggles in the local setting.54 The women narrating their individual
and collective experiences in the film – similarly to Fyssas’s case above –
do not proclaim themselves as ‘heroic’; yet, their take on white supremacy
reveals a posture that stands firmly against the inferior role they are
assigned in the societies they live in, which is exclusionary in more than
one ways. One of these women self-identifies as androgynous and
speaks about the multiple exclusionary structures she faced growing up
in Germany as being both gender-fluid at birth and a person of colour.
Whereas the politics of experience are not always thought through the
figure of the heroic (which often points to universality), Kelly’s work casts
these unwavering configurations of everyday resistance as meriting
honour and praise. The intransigent gesture is a gesture of determination
and courage, an allegory for awakening, standing for the ‘truth’ of black,
female and transgender liberation. The fidelity to the oppressed truth is
further performed through the realist narrative that evades the usual
effects of parody, irony and cynicism towards the concept of truth in
general.
While in Milli’s Awakening the heroic constellation exhibits an anti-
racial politics of experience, in Mary Zygouri’s project Round Up, pre-
sented in the framework of Documenta 14,55 it intertwines gender,
migrant and other ‘minor’ histories, alongside figures of epic and heroic
antifascism. Zygouri’s community project took place from January to
April 2017 in the working-class Athenian neighbourhood of Kokkinia
(roughly translated as ‘Red District’), where in March of 1944 the local
Resistance fighters successfully defended the area from invading Nazi
forces – in a historic confrontation known as the ‘Battle of Kokkinia’. In
order to break the morale of the anti-Nazi fighters, the German occupiers
and their local stooges besieged the area, raided houses, burned buildings
and publicly executed more than 200 residents in August of the same year
– an event known as the ‘Blockade of Kokkinia’. The atrocities against the
local population strengthened the spirit of resistance, turning the executed
into martyrs for the community.56
Zygouri set out to re-enact an iconic performance by the artist Maria
Karavela (active since the 1960s) that took place in Kokkinia in 1979,
more than thirty years after the gruesome events and just five years after
the military junta of 1967–1974, the most recent fascist regime in
Greece, fell. In 1977, Karavela made the film Resistance, for which she
interviewed people with memories of the communist resistance during
the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War that followed (1946–
1949). She intended to show this film in several public places across
Athens so as to stage Resistance stories that countered the official, state-
led anti-communism of the time. Unsurprisingly, the film was censored
12
57 Up until 1982, the Greek
state did not recognise the
massive communist-led
Resistance during WWII,
portraying it instead as a
plot to undermine the
country.
58 Karavela called artworks
that combine various media
and methods so as to enact
events that would touch
upon sensitive historical
issues, emotionally provoke
and even shock the
unsuspecting passer-by
‘composite art’.
59 M Jacqui Alexander,
Pedagogies of Crossing:
Meditations on Feminism,
Sexual Politics, Memory,
and the Sacred, Duke
University Press, Durham,
North Carolina, 2005, p 21
60 The affective power of
memory and the spectre of
the heroic were magnified in
the last part of the
performance, when the
actual execution site where
the contemporary
spectators stood was
flooded with red dyed water
meant to evoke the blood of
the martyrs.
by the (then) government for being non-objective communist propa-
ganda.57 Karavela’s unsanctioned screening of the film in working-class
Kokkinia in 1979 was accompanied by a conceptual rendering of the trau-
matic events that involved the actual, surviving mothers of the dead Resist-
ance fighters publicly lamenting their loss as they received from the
performer white, blood-stained shirts meant to represent their sons. This
was one of the few events (if not the only one) in post-WWII Greece
that performed a cathartic, maternal and female lament for the executed
in the spirit of Karavela’s ‘composite’ artwork.58
Rather than merely setting out to do what Karavela had left unfinished,
the goal of Zygouri was to negotiate and experiment with these ‘minor’
heroic and female histories in relation to the – by now monumentalised
– events of Kokkinia. Zygouri’s long-term community work, as part of
the project, involved workshops with high-school children (some of
them descendants of the very families of the executed) as well as with
migrant children (encountering the racist violence from the neo-Nazi
thugs currently operating in the area). This ‘pedagogy of crossing’, as M
Jacqui Alexander calls the rehearsing of feminist and oppressed knowl-
edge paradigms traversing the boundaries of the secular and the
sacred,59 would here interweave with the actual historical events and
the affective bonds related to them; execution, martyrdom and heroism
would turn their traumatic legacies into a spectre haunting present politi-
cal affiliations.60 This spectre would enable an ongoing divide in the area
between the physical (and ideological) descendants of the Nazi-supporting
locals (the ones indicating to the Nazis whom they should execute) and the
descendants of the executed communists and the migrant children. Ten-
sions rose a day before Zygouri’s performance in April 2017, when
Nazi-sympathising schoolchildren, descendants of the local Nazi collabor-
ators, painted swastikas all over the walls of the neighbourhood’s high
school to bully participants in what they perceived to be a communist-
friendly event. The same bullies, according to Zygouri, were physically
intimidating recently arrived migrant children with whom they share the
same schoolyards.
While not a central theme in her performance, for our purposes we can
refer to how Zygouri’s pedagogy of crossing, following Karavela’s minor
histories of the community, traversed the spectral actuality of the sacred
hero in its contemporary material unfolding and reverberations. The
hero in this case was the most intransigent anti-Nazi communist partisan,
Aris Velouchiotis (1905–1945). After the liberation of Greece in 1944,
Velouchiotis did not follow the Communist Party line of partisan disarma-
ment so he could continue fighting against the newly arrived British forces,
whom he regarded as the new colonisers and representatives of global
capital. Alienated from the Communist Party and abandoned by most
of his comrades, he eventually committed suicide after being chased
down by government forces in central Greece’s mountainous regions.
Velouchiotis, a legend and largely sacred figure among Greek anti-fascists
and the anti-imperialist left, is regularly exalted for his courage, revolu-
tionary purity, self-sacrifice and dedication to the cause.
As both a Fanon-type anti-colonial hero and a ‘communist
patriot’, Velouchiotis’s ‘presence’ at the performance site had the capacity
to intimidate the largely liberal artworld, and especially the Greek liberals,
who associate him with old-school, anti-imperialist communism. As a

61 Michel Foucault, The
Government of Self and
Others, Graham Burchell,
trans, Palgrave Macmillan,
London, 2011; Michel,
Foucault, The Courage of
Truth: The Government of
Self and Others II, Graham
Burchell, trans, Palgrave
Macmillan, London, 2012
62 Foucault, The Government
of Self and Others, op cit, p
64
63 Ibid, p 65
64 Foucault, The Courage of
Truth, op cit, p 186
65 Foucault, The Government
of Self and Others, op cit,
p 70
13
result of his controversial reputation, some Documenta 14 organisers did
not want his photograph to be on display at the museum where Zygouri
performed, where it normally features in a prominent place, and even-
tually moved it to the nearby school (another of the performance
venues). Yet, the local community perceived his photograph to be an
iconic representation of partisan struggles – a perception that, for some
at least, made apparent the limits of moderate, art-institutional politics
vis-à-vis the (anti-fascist) heroic. Furthermore, to relay a telling anecdote,
when, in the course of a seminar led by Zygouri in the museum commem-
orating the executions, Velouchiotis’s photograph was accidently dropped
on the floor and was about to be stepped on by a schoolboy, a local inhabi-
tant’s gut-reaction was to shout dramatically at the boy: “No, not Aris!”
(The boy eventually jumped over the photograph at the last moment.) In
this hero-as-relic quality, the materiality of the image assumes a supra-
natural form, becoming a form of sacred magic. Here, the realisation of
Jacqui Alexander’s ‘crossing’ takes place as the largely sacred figure of
Velouchiotis is both perceived as holy, other-worldly and as a source
inspiring communitarian enmity against present-day Nazis. The relic’s
hyper-natural power turns it into an index containing the traumatic
memory of the past, and also causes it to motivate anti-fascist positions
in the present.
In both the Afro-German women as well as in the minor, affective and
more-than-secular crossings of Zygouri, there is an element of risk – in the
first case, created by telling the ‘truth’ of black female experience of being
dominated by ‘whiteness’, and in the second, by intersecting holy figures of
historical anti-fascist heroism with their present-day actualities. Overlap-
ping the tropes of heroism and sacrifice, another intransigent modality for
anti-fascist politics that I look at is parrhesia, that is to say the act of telling
truth to power,61 a truth reflected in a respective ‘style of life’. Michel Fou-
cault regarded parrhesia as the opposite of the performative act, in the
sense that the former opens up an unidentified risk for the person practis-
ing it, while the latter is not supposed to entail this risk. The parrhesiastic
act, contrary to the performative one, which ‘effectuates the thing it pro-
claims’ (here, Foucault’s understanding of the performative comes from J
L Austin rather than its subsequent opening up by queer theorists such as
Judith Butler), is a pact between the speaking subject and herself.62 The
statement of truth against power binds the enunciator to that truth in a
way that their lifestyle becomes modified.63 The quality of parrhesia
describes, for Foucault, both revolutionaries and nonconformist artists,
as in both cases there was an emphasis on the ‘style of life’ and the sub-
sequent ‘manifestation of truth’ in practising this life.64 There is, then, a
pact in the person practising parrhesia between the statement and one’s
self, as in the act of asserting the truth ‘one constitutes oneself as the
person who tells the truth, who has held the truth, and who recognises
oneself in and as the person who has told the truth’.65
The trope of parrhesia, as well as heroism and self-sacrifice, is pushed
to its limits in the work of the Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky. His two
most recent performances in Moscow and Paris spoke ‘truth to power’,
resulting in his physical confinement. In 2016, he was imprisoned in
Moscow, and at the time of writing, Pavlensky is serving a prison sentence
in Paris. For his first performance titled The Threat, Pavlensky burned the
door of the headquarters of the FSB (the successor of the KGB) in
14
66 Петр Павленский,
‘Наслаждаюсь жизнью’
(Pyotr Pavlensky, ‘I Am
Enjoying Life’), Meduza, 22
February 2018, Lilya
Mukhamedzhanova, trans,
https://meduza.io/feature/
2018/02/22/naslazhdayus-
zhiznyu, accessed 7 July
2018
67 The full text can be read
here: https://insurrect
ionnewsworldwide.com
/2018/03/20/rojava-
announcement-from
-revolutionary-union-
for-internationalist-
solidarity-
ruis-about-haukur-
hilmarsson/, accessed 5
January 2019.
68 This phrase comes from a
video devoted to Haukur
after his death, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?
v=UOC_7hUwnQE,
accessed 5 January 2019.
69 This is pointed out by a
comrade of Haukur in the
following text: https://
insurrectionnews
worldwide.com/page/3/ ,
accessed 10 January 2019.
70 Ibid, para 11
71 The void that the
trivialisation of Resistance
in public history and
discourse in France would
leave for anti-fascist politics
was already identified in
1974, the election year of
Giscard d’Estaing, by
Pascal Bonitzer and Serge
Toubiana, editors of
Cahiers du Cinéma. In an
interview with Michel
Foucault, they note how the
new technocratic culture of
the post-Gaullist France in
the 1970s would promote a
cynical view of Resistance
that would also
simultaneously and
implicitly disavow anti-
fascism as a heroic,
monumental fossil of the
past. In contrast, as they put
it, ‘(s)omething else is
beginning to be written and
represented: that France
wasn’t all that anti-fascist,
that the French couldn’t
have cared less about
Nazism, that anti-fascism
and the Resistance were
only ever, precisely, this
Lubyanka Street in Moscow. For this, Pavlensky spent eight months in
detention before being released on a bail in June 2017. Because of the
threat of a new criminal case, he fled to France, where he was granted pol-
itical asylum. However, rather than enjoying his status as an anti-Putin
hero in France, Pavlensky violated the rules of hospitality, turning, in
effect, against his hosts. In November 2017, he set fire to another door,
this time the entrance of an office of the Bank of France.
Both actions were conceived as protests against obvious symbols of
power, the first of the authoritarianism of the Russian state and the
second of capitalism. As he put it in a recent interview about the 2017
French elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron encapsulate
a moment of total domination against which one has to act fanatically,
in a similar way to that of the Garrisonians; there ‘are few reasons for
joy when you are given a choice between a fascist and a banker’.66 For
Pavlensky, the FSB and the Bank of France represent different articula-
tions of oppressive institutions: the first, the secret state police that restricts
freedom; the second, the banking system that enables class oppression (in
an interview from inside the prison Pavlensky further referred to how the
Bank of France financed the military forces to destroy the Paris Commune
and kill 35,000 communards). In both these actions, artistic resistance is
performed as a form of speaking truth to power that in turn bears signifi-
cant consequences in the enunciator’s way of life (imprisonment). The per-
formances, then, or, better, the parrhesiastic acts, disclose the boundaries
of artistic freedom when confronting institutions of power.
‘Either We All Become Heroines or None of Us’
Haukur Hilmarsson was an Icelandic anarchist, fighting, as many other
international volunteers, for the International Freedom Battalion in
Rojava, Syria. He was killed during the Turkish army invasion of Afrin
in March 2018. Following his death, a text dedicated to his memory
appeared in an anti-fascist platform; Haukur ‘became immortal’, his para-
digm ‘guides revolutionaries and scares the fascists’, Haukur is not dead;
his spirit lives ‘in our resistance against fascism and tyranny’, it empowers
us ‘to continue the struggle for social liberation’.67 Yet Haukur, a ‘hero of
the age’,68 should not, according to a comrade of his, be seen as a hero, as
heroic constructions may eventually serve to ritualise and pacify resist-
ance.69 In the struggle against fascism, as his comrade insists, ‘either we
all become heroines or none of us’.70 The danger of heroic politics is pre-
cisely this: that heroism is turned into an accomplished fact, a fossilised
representation, and a cult of exceptional individuals, usually created at
the safe distance that time affords, in which the initial militant spirit is
lost and forgotten. There is, then, a tension at the heart of the heroic
between the everydayness of the unwavering actuality and its possible
spectacularisation, even by institutions that the ‘hero’ would normally
oppose. The format of the ritual and commemoration – even if fossilised
– can potentially enable anti-fascist effects in itself;71 but the heroic deed
is always part of an intransigent actuality, an everydayness that would cul-
minate in moments of fascist danger. Artistic explorations can offer ways
to enter these dynamics of intransigence and heroism by construing them

derisory image of Gaullist
“grandeur” which is now
showing its false nose.
What is emerging is a
cynical ideology: that of big
business, of the
multinational and
technocratic culture that
Giscard represents.’ Michel
Foucault, Pascal Bonitzer
and Serge Toubiana, ‘Anti-
retro’, op cit, 159.
72 Gordon H McCormick,
‘Terrorist decision making’,
Annual Review of Political
Science, vol 6, no 1, 2003,
pp 473–507
73 As Ellen Rutten discusses in
her book Sincerity after
Communism (2017),
sincerity (or its
performance) became a
literary and artistic style in
Russia (and globally) as a
way to come to terms with
the post-communist
trauma. Also see: Adam
Kelly, ‘David Foster
Wallace and the New
Sincerity in American
fiction’, in David Hering,
ed, Consider David Foster
Wallace: Critical Essays,
Sideshow Media Group
Press, Austin, Los Angeles,
2010, pp 131–146.
74 Edward Jackson, and Joel
Nicholson-Roberts, ‘White
Guys: Questioning Infinite
Jest’s New Sincerity’, Orbit:
A Journal of American
Literature, vol 5, no 1,
2017, p 4
75 Ibid, pp 13–14. See also
Panos Kompatsiaris, ‘Art
Struggles: Confronting
Internships and Unpaid
Labour in Contemporary
Art’, tripleC:
Communication,
Capitalism & Critique, vol
13, no 2, 2015, pp 554–566
15
as an actual possibility in the present rather than a thing of the past that we
now have to playfully overcome.
The position of committed art vis-a-vis fascism is vulnerable from the
start. Art nurtures an array of social phenomena that have been histori-
cally connected to fascist tendencies, including endemic narcissism, an
apolitical fascination with technology, and strong ties with political and
economic power; an artist can possibly never inspire the same way that
Haukur does. Yet, moving beyond contingency, potentiality and perfor-
mativity as concepts to resist the shifting totality of current techno-entre-
preneurial fascisms, artistic production can aesthetically explore the
actualities, possibilities and modalities of politics of partisanship and
self-sacrifice as means to mobilise actualities of resistance.
The sacrificial and parrhesiastic constellations that we saw through the
works discussed above reveal intensities, strategies, limits and potential-
ities of intransigent politics. First, in Kelly’s video, we have a politics of
experience relating to an everydayness that goes beyond the spectacular
deed. It is an anti-sensational heroism that conveys firmness and commit-
ment to black female liberation via a ‘common’ desire: that of living and
creating (Kelly’s women were all artists). In contrast to Kelly’s focus on
these (largely secular) desires, Zygouri deals with figures of heroism, mar-
tyrdom and sacrifice as they navigate the boundaries between mythology
and everydayness, the epic and the minor, the worshiping and its perfor-
mativity. The mnemonic repetition of Kokkinia’s heroes, related to an
often uninspiring left-wing melancholy, is here replaced by the ‘minor’
uses of the hero, involving Karavela’s performance, the maternal
lament, the migrant and local children and the affective investments in
Velouchiotis’s figure. In turn, Pavlensky’s transgressiveness as a means
to inspire to action invokes methods rooted in anarchist populism
(notably, the ‘propaganda of the deed’),72 representing militancy as
abiding by the law and assuming responsibility for it. His martyrdom,
nevertheless, relates less to forms of revolutionary organising than to a
personal style of life that hopes to inspire collective action against author-
itarian and capitalist symbols of power.
This politicised sincerity converses with the wider politics of the
concept of ‘new sincerity’ that has been used to describe different forms
of cultural production, involving literature (David Foster Wallace,
Victor Pelevin), film (Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson) and music (Cat
Power), expressing an effort to move beyond the postmodern by redisco-
vering straightforwardness and truth as vehicles to escape self-reflective
complacency.73 Yet, insofar as it lacks a larger political vision of social
equality, this sincerity may reproduce the neoliberal ethos of personal con-
fession, self-expression and self-fulfilment, in which ‘truth’ becomes a
form of individual responsibility.74 An anti-fascist sincerity, in contrast,
needs to enable collective actualities that would oppose fascist oppressions
and assemble more equal futures.
To conclude, this desire to tell the truth against embedded institutional
structures is in line with the ethos of what the critic Dave Beech calls
‘Boycott! Withdraw! Protest’, involving ‘public acts of dissent, direct
action, and speaking truth to power’.75 According to this ethos, aesthetics
are intrinsically linked with ethics, and resistant actions are directed
against the very contexts of presentation as rejection and negativity
rather than merely critical participation. As such, in the last five years or
16

so we have witnessed the boycotting of celebrated biennales (indicatively,

Sydney, Manifesta and Istanbul), protests against exploitative work
relations in museums (Guggenheim Abu Dhabi) and protests against
unethical corporate funding (Liberate Tate). In these cases, the practice
of telling to truth to power – where power can be conceived as nesting
in sites ranging from neoliberalism to states – involves dividing the
social space between friends and enemies. The tropes discussed in the
works above may express forms of politicised sincerity in contemporary
art, in which emotion, affect, immediacy and concepts such as truth, con-
sistency and commitment to a cause can be mobilised as a possibility
against the current tide of fascist politics – politics that are experienced
as outright oppression by the social subjects they target. The heroic vis-
a-vis fascism is a particular yet universalising gesture; either we all
become heroines or none of us do.

ORCID
Panos Kompatsiaris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2452-6109