On the issue of continuity between the Veneti and the Slovenes

The classical Venetic theory that appeared in the eighties advocated the presence of the Slovenes (in German traditionally referred to by the signifier Windisch) in areas South of the Danube long before the sixth century, when, according to the dominant scenarios of academic thought, these areas were first settled by the proto-Slavs. The classical Venetic theory was rejected by the linguistic, historiographic and archaeological sciences and since then it has been considered a pseudo-scientific thought. The aim of this paper is to present to the international professional and general public the latest development in the Venetic theory; it is therefore an updated, critique considering, version of the Venetic theory on the origins of the Slovenes and other ethnic Slavs. With it, by the application of a set of formal-analytic and discursive-analytic methods of reading of sources in the ethno-symbolic approach to the understanding of nationality, and within the concept of hegemony the role of political sciences in the science of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs has been determined. In this paper the power of the (counter-hegemonic) argument prevails over the argument of (hegemonic) power, as the attribution of the Venetic ethnonym to the corpus of inscriptions of the Atestine archaeological culture has been legitimately dismissed, and consequently the theory of the sixth century settlement of the Slovenes / the Slavs, i.e. the Veneti, in the areas between the Adriatic and the Danube has been rejected. The paper serves as an act of counter-hegemony in the Slovene historiography and memory studies.