Engramma 233 examines how the contemporary Far Right, lacking a genuinely new political imaginary, consistently reactivates a repertoire of visual survivals. The issue presents the first translation into Italian, English, and Spanish of Martin Warnke's Politische Ikonographie (1993), with some Notes on the Concept of Schlagbild by Margherita Picciché, examining the concepts of Schlagbild and the public sphere. The issue is organized into three sections: Myths and (Un)truths, Crowded Masses, Far Right Bodies. Myths and (Un)truths traces the ideological roots of myth in the visual politics of the contemporary right, through contributions by Emanuele Arielli (Not True, but Right), on the strategic function of falsity in right-wing visual communication; Irene Galuppo (Mito, simbolo, antichità), on Julius Evola as iconographic reservoir for the global Far Right; Nicolas Martino (Le anime nere), on the shared Romantic matrix of anti-liberal right and economic liberalism; Luis Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez (La blanquitud de Apolo), on classical statuary as ideological support for Alt-right racial doctrine; Kathrin Rottmann and Friederike Sigler (The Aesthetics of Technofascism), on contemporary American technofascism from apocalyptic masculinity to the trad wife; Thomas Helbig (A Magical Aid to Experience), on Warburg’s analysis of LUCE video on La conciliazione and its relevance to AI-generated media. Crowded Masses shifts attention to the collective body, through contributions by Elif Akyüz (Downloading Martyrs), on Turkey’s iconographic exploitation of the failed 2016 coup; Jacopo Galimberti (A Neoliberal Caspar David Friedrich), on the AfD’s reactivation of German Romantic landscape imagery; Tom Holert (False Flags?), on the semiotic creativity generated by the legal prohibition of the swastika; Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (The Visual Politics of ‘Danishness’), on the mainstreaming of xenophobia in Danish party politics. Far Right Bodies approaches the body as a surface of ideological inscription, through contributions by Luka Arsenjuk and Mauro Resmini (Surface Derangement), on Trumpian ‘iconorrhea’ as a seriality stripped of myth; Erica Capecchi (Far Right Virilities in Digital Spaces), on the digital masculinity of Matteo Salvini and Jair Bolsonaro; Kathrin Fahlenbrach (Right-Wing Communication Guerilla), on the femonationalist détournement of feminist protest forms; Clio Nicastro (Soldiers of Lights), on diet and bodily self-optimization as a symbolic system of Far Right belonging. The issue closes with Nicole Coffineau’s Hillbilly Split, reading the series Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, 2020) as a narrative apparatus whose cinematic failures are the very condition of its political efficacy.
Jacopo Galimberti (Thu,) studied this question.