The Likeness

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What do US first lady Melania Trump, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and avant-industrial band Laibach have in common? All of these Slovenian figures, argues Gretchen Bakke, turn dominant European and American assumptions about the proper layering of surface, self, and sincerity inside out. In this brilliant, Möbius strip ethnography of Slovenian art and politics, Bakke offers readers a disconcerting, hilarious, and dead serious account of some of our disturbing days' troubles with doubles."––Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond "It's dangerous to call a book about copies 'original'—especially when that book does as good a job as Gretchen Bakke's does of making us question our attachment to the term. From paintings to philosophers, from politician to piano bars, in contemporary Slovenia, doubles abound. Exceptional among the nations that emerged from the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia weathered the tumultuous 1990s 'like a greased eel, ' as Bakke puts it in her inimitable prose, 'slipping away from the troubled history the rest of that nation would bear.'  Slovenians did so by replicating strategies that seemed to work in other places, although one cannot really say they made them their own. Bakke is concerned with copies that present themselves as copies—a Walter Benjamin who neither looks nor sounds like the one who died in Spain in 1940, a Mondrian that is not a forgery but a quote. Replication doesn’t deepen understanding by marrying an inner essence to an outer surface. Rather, it complicates the picture, multiplying contexts and connections to build bridges across histories that are both singular and intertwined. Bakke shows how Slovenian artists used this strategy to resist the interiorized forms of personhood associated with integration into the European Union. But she also describes a penchant that extends much further. Melania Trump belongs to the Slovenia Bakke conjures, but so does Slavoj Žižek, Bakke accounts for the public presence of both with humor and breathtaking skill. If there is anything like The Likeness out there, I have yet to encounter it. A beautiful, brilliant book." ––Danilyn Rutherford, author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier "Brilliant, provocative, and entertaining, Gretchen Bakke has produced an unconventional ethnography in which the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Melania Trump are served up as paradigmatic of a 'Slovene' kind of subjectivity—one that rejects the notion of an inner 'truth' of a person that needs to be excavated and expressed. The Likeness reveals the American cultural assumptions that undergird our theories of ethics."–Krisztina Fehérváry, author of Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary "The Likeness is a first of its kind: an andorpersand ethnography of Slovenian subjectivity through art and thought, and/or something totally different. Perfect in its imperfections, this is a breath of fresh air in the thick mist of social theory, and/or a lot of fun."––Roger Sansi, author of Art, Anthropology and the Gift