Who is Yum-Yum? A Cartoon State in the Making

The departure of this article is a Danish public campaign called ‘Healthy through play’. The campaign is organized around a cartoon figure named Yum-Yum. Yum-Yum is the campaign’s description of itself, but it also becomes a semantic of the State. With Yum-Yum, the state is turned into a cartoon character with long plushy ears, widely spaced eyes, and a very large and soft nose. Maybe we are witness to the making of a carton State, a playful State? Yum-Yum is cute, friendly, playful, inviting, and above all completely harmless. The cartoon state seems to be a state that gets in the way of itself. It is a state whose impotence consists precisely in the fact that it is state. The state would rather be (civil) society. In order to work as state and have power over the self-relation of it citizens, it has to look different than a state. The state plays that it is (not) a state and hopes that someone will play along so that it may yet work as state.