Contemporary philosophy often turns to art as a way of rethinking the political. Art opens a space in which perception, relation, and forms of collective life can be explored differently. It works at the level of sensibility and experience, where the conditions of contemporary life can be shifted before they are fully articulated or organised politically.

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This course brings into proximity a set of distinct yet intersecting attempts to think at this level: Gilles Deleuze’s micropolitics of the everyday, Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Maurice Blanchot's inoperative community, and Slavoj Žižek’s ideological fantasy. What links them is a shared suspicion that politics cannot be grasped solely at the level of institutions, declarations, or explicit beliefs. In each case, art becomes a privileged site, by reshaping how the political is perceived, opening it to new ways of seeing, feeling and thinking.

 

In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, micropolitics refers to the almost invisible shifts through which life actually changes. While traditional politics deals with big blocks like the State or social classes, micropolitics focuses on the "minor": a change in how we speak, a refusal of a habit, or a sudden detour in what we desire. It is what always escapes the rigid grids of society, much like Bartleby’s quiet refusal ("I would prefer not to"). Cinema and literature provide the means to think freedom on the level of the small but effective steps that open up new political possibilities.

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For Slavoj Žižek, ideology is embedded in what appears most obvious. Ideological fantasy structures reality at the level of everyday practice, anchoring power not in secrecy but in repetition and familiarity. Where Michel Foucault emphasizes the dispersion of power, Žižek stresses the persistence of central fantasies that hold social reality together in plain sight, even as they remain inherently unstable. Art and popular culture become crucial here as sites where these fantasies can falter, where what usually appears self-evident is briefly unsettled, and where new possibilities can begin to emerge.

 

In Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, community cannot be founded on shared identity, myth, or ideological position. Instead, community is "inoperative," emerging only through a shared exposure to our own incompleteness and finitude. Literature plays an essential role here: it breaks with the myth of the "We" without creating a new one. Literature stages a fragile being-in-common that resists closure and totalization.