The Work On/Out Myth: Political Mythologisation and Physical Performance

Recent years has seen an increased focus on the role of myth in contemporary politics (Della Sala, 2023; Moulton, 2022; Kirke and Steele, 2023; Moulton 2024). This paper begins to outline how we may explore not just the oral and visual articulation of myth, but the actual performance of myth through the physical body. These links are fruitfully explored via existentialist approaches to political myth, that conceive of myth as a process with continuous as “work” on a continuous dramatic and figurative narrative designed to provide adherents with a sense of significance (Bedeutsamkeit) (Blumenberg, 1985, Bottici, 2007, Kirke, 2015). Myths here serve as filtering mechanisms against the absolutism of reality, a state of extreme anxiety, in which we are overwhelmed by the simultaneous processes of the world that are indifferent to our specific conditions of existence (Blumenberg, 1985). Regardless of their ‘truth’ or not, myths provide ontological security because they can be constantly invoked for particular (inter)subjective needs, whereas the absolutism of reality generates insecurity. Myths are not static objects, but an active process incorporating innumerable sites of articulation and reproduction. It is this continuous “work on myth” that makes them so adaptable to our present conditions of existence. The paper argues that a site for the work on myth may actually also be found in the work-out, a performance of political subjectivities that are particularly amenable to far-right discourse. It considers what the analytical and normative consequences of this are.