The concept of subversive affirmation is often credited to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his 1993 essay 'Why Are Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst Not Fascists?'
[4] In his essay Žižek made use of the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan to argue that in its musical and artistic performance, Laibach, a band that makes use of totalitarian-style aesthetics, was not providing an ironic imitation of official communist state ideology, but was frustrating the system by over-identifying with its obscene superego underside and manipulating the process of transference with the totalitarian state.
In contrast to film theories that give a specific gender identification to Lacan's notion of the gaze, subversive affirmation emphasizes the inconsistency of symbolic mandates and the fact that there is no Big Other.
Žižek's psychoanalytic approach to subversive affirmation and over-identification is applied to the study of the work of Michael Moore, IRWIN, The Yes Men, Atelier Van Lieshout, and Christoph Schlingensief in a book edited by the Dutch collective BAVO in 2007.
In Surrealism, the use of conservative trappings, for example the illusionistic forms of representation in the paintings of René Magritte, or the Surrealists' bourgeois clothing and bureaucratic model of organization, could be thought of as antecedents to subversive affirmation.