Absurdities of Indeterminacy: Swastikas and Playing with the Token-Type Relationship

Abstract Far-right political leaders, supporters, and regular Bulgarian citizens deploy swastikas in ways that play with the indeterminacy of the token-type relationship in strategic ways. As they highlight the swastika as a perpetually unstable token, they work to prevent it from being apprehended as an instantiation of a Nazi type. Such deployments rely on strategically mobilizing semiotic indeterminacy across different contexts. Tracing actors’ deployments of signs like the swastika allows us to better understand how people mobilize token-type relations—and to what ends—within the public sphere of an expanding European Union.