Negative Solidarities, the Perils of “Reading” and the Acts of Resistance of Books and Artworks

Abstract

Over the centuries and across different cultures, books and artworks have been objects of acts of vandalism, violence or hate, ban and censorship. In those different forms, biblioclasm and iconoclasm are often caused by the fear of the oppositional force that specific books and artworks may pose to consolidated power structures, cultural tenets (which are often complicit with those structures), and moral frameworks of individuals and social groups. In this article I discuss contemporary examples of different forms of book- and art-hate to focus on how the “objects of hate” have in turn offered resistance to the acts of violence against them.