RIFL (2019) Vol. 13, n. 2: 94-102 DOI: 10.4396/12201904 __________________________________________________________________________________ 94 The Concept of Logoclastic Violence in Carinthia 1 Dejan Makovec University of Pittsburgh dem161@pitt.edu Abstract The Ortstafelsturm, the „storm on the town signs‟, was a series of political events in 1972 in Carinthia, Austria, in which up to 300 individuals participated in tearing down bilingual street signs that were erected days before by the Austrian government in areas where an autochthonous Slovene minority lives. Jennifer M. Gully (2011) refers to these events as instances of logoclastic or „language-breaking‟ violence. With this term Gully identifies a rather complex political phenomenon that involves a conflict over bilingualism. The term, however, goes otherwise undefined. In this paper I try to reverse-engineer Gully‟s notion of logoclastic violence from the particular phenomenon it is applied to. With reference to Benedict Anderson‟s and Ernest Gellner‟s theories of nationalism, I argue that it can be understood as a struggle between monolingual and multilingual conceptions of an imagined community. Keywords: Logoclastic Violence, Bilingualism, Imagined Community, Carinthian Slovenes, Nationalism Received 29 May 2019; accepted 25 October 2019. 0. Introduction The Ortstafelsturm, the „storm on the town signs‟, was a series of political events in 1972 in Carinthia, Austria, in which up to 300 individuals participated in tearing down bilingual street signs that were erected days before by the Austrian government in areas where an autochthonous Slovene minority lives. Jennifer M. Gully (2011) refers to these events as instances of logoclastic or „language-breaking‟ violence. With this term Gully identifies a rather complex political phenomenon that involves a conflict over bilingualism. The term, however, goes otherwise undefined. In this paper I try to reverse-engineer Gully‟s notion of logoclastic violence from the particular phenomenon it is applied to. What is the difference between logoclastic violence and iconoclastic violence – the politically motivated destruction of images, icons or monuments? The violence surrounding the Ortstafelsturm was not exclusively directed at bilingual place name signs, but was aimed at authorities and monuments as well. What distinguishes logoclastic violence from iconoclastic violence may be that the former is aimed at language while the latter is aimed at icons, images, monuments. But this object-oriented strategy to 1 I thank Gareth Price and Günther Rautz as well as two anonymous reviewers of the article for helpful comments.