The Politics Through Arts and Culture: On Slovenian Literary Nationalism

Abstract

The expanded concept of work of art that challenges the boundaries of aesthetic theory and directs the attention toward the artistic service as a flexible cognitive activity is useful in the field of politics. Today's societies are faced with the expanded concept of the political that is set at the intersection of politics-as-we-know-it (including the national state and the parliament) and the novel modes of the (post)political including the activities of civil society, international organizations, and the cultural. This chapter refers to the Slovenian literary nationalism as one of the key Slovenian ideological state apparatuses that is at play in today's Slovenian politics and is deeply affected by not-just-political agents from economy, religion, lifestyle, and culture. The criticism of literary nationalism is not directed towards the activity of writing and the literary world but towards institutions that form a literary-ideological, interpretative, and propaganda context of national literary production.