Fiction, Truth, Politics: The aesthetical Dimension of Actuality. From Arendt to Rancière
by Massimo Villani
pp. 188-205 Issue 12 (6,2) – July-December 2019 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2019.6.2.11
Abstract
Actuality works in a medial dimension, in which the real only expresses itself, without referencing anything else. That of medium is a spurious space, loaded with cognitive and libidinal stains that the subjects leave behind in their relationships. Politics, in the neoliberal period, wears itself out in this context that has no links with stable facts, that is not shielded from human affairs. Starting from some of Hannah Arendt’s considerations about the relational character of truth, it is possible to think of political praxis in this rigorously post-foundational context. With Jacques Rancière, we will then observe how the real, in order to be thought, needs to be turned into fiction: politics is a dispute about fiction of the common space, about how its material and symbolic configuration is imagined. But faking equality of anyone with everyone means in fact practicing it.