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1. 1 2024-02-22T08:31:32-08:00 Emma Larson afd6b30016aae2a10d6ad8ce47701bfcf5c24354 Annotation Emma Larson 2 This short clip provides an example of both kinds of overidentification used by the Party of the Dead: that of language and of the necrophiliac biopolitics employed by contemporary Russia. plain 2024-02-22T08:34:01-08:00 Emma Larson afd6b30016aae2a10d6ad8ce47701bfcf5c24354

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• 1 2024-02-22T08:42:44-08:00 Overidentification in Party of the Dead and the Immortal Regiment 2 Blog Post 2 plain 2024-02-23T11:05:53-08:00         In “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,” Arns and Sasse define overidentification as a form of protest that uses “imitative exaggeration” of the language and practice of a discourse situated within that being criticized to “make explicit the implications of an ideology” and show viewers, listeners, and participants the full extent and underlying meaning of an ideology they maintain (Arns and Sasse, 448).
  
          Maksim Evstropov’s Party of the Dead is a notable example of how overidentification can be used to critique a political ideology that manifests itself through the “bio and necropolitical technologies” of Putin’s United Russia (Hanukai, 819). Holding signs with parodic slogans that poke fun at official language while dressing up as skeletons and donning large photographs of skulls, participants in Party of the Dead demonstrations use overidentification in two ways. Firstly, by employing the technique of mimicry to imbue official political language with absurdity, the signs held by Party of the Dead participants overidentify with the language of the state to “decontextualize” and “deterritorialize” such language from within (Hanukai, 821). Additionally, the skeletal costumes of Party of the Dead participants overidentify by showing that if the living can truly act as surrogates for the dead, as the political necrophilia of contemporary Russia would suggest, then subversive political actors can also “speak for the dead.” Overidentifying with necrophiliac biopolitics to protest dominant state ideologies, Party of the Dead demonstrations aim to represent, and thus “bring to life,” those left behind by the existing ideological milieu (Hanukai, 821).
              
          The effectiveness of overidentification as a form of protest is found in the way that the technique implicates either viewers, listeners, or participants in the extremity of that they would otherwise accept. In Party of the Dead demonstrations, the Russian political system acts as the “viewer,” as it faces the full implication of the necrophiliac ideology it maintains, namely that its necrophiliac biopolitics can be used to push forward ideologies it does not agree with. This form of overidentification contrasts with examples of the technique in which participants themselves become incriminated in the full implication of their worldviews, political beliefs, and desires.
  
          It is perhaps then evocative to consider that the Immortal Regiment, a movement that embodies the very necrophiliac biopolitics that Party of the Dead critiques, may itself be employing this second type of overidentification, in which participants are placed within extreme situations and exposed to the weight of ideologies they would otherwise subscribe to. Coopted from a grassroots movement of liberal organizers who wanted to focus commemorations of World War II on the memory of lost veterans, the Immortal Regiment overidentifies with participants’ desire to memorialize familial loss by transferring this loss from a personal and familial memory to a memory shared by the nation. Though this act does identify with and give voice to people’s desire to memorialize their loss by investing familial memory with a “longer temporal duration of survival” provided by the state, it also implicates participants in a larger and much more nefarious political project that positions the state as the ultimate sovereign who controls not only who remembers and how, but also who lives and why (Assmann from Hanukai, 808). Through the Immortal Regiment, the state has artfully overidentified with the very real desire to remember and memorialize lost family members and has taken this desire to an almost unimaginable extreme by encouraging participants to act as living surrogates for their ancestors and thus move beyond “memorialization” to “immemorialization.” All the while, the state positions itself as the ultimate sovereign who controls and sanctions the biopolitics of this process.  
  
          The overidentification inherent in the Immortal Regiment is clearly not a form of protest, both because the representation of the state as the ultimate sovereign leaves protest in all forms futile and due to the fact participants in the Immortal Regiment likely remain unaware of the state’s cooptation and overidentification with their personal desire to memorialize the dead. The movement does, however, serve as an example of how the techniques of protest, including over-identification, can be coopted, manipulated, and instrumentalized from above.