Is it still possible to imagine a political horizon beyond confrontation, polarization, and entrenched ideologies? Contemporary philosophy increasingly turns to art as a way of rethinking what the political might mean today. This course explores three concepts - Gilles Deleuze’s micropolitics, Jean-Luc Nancy’s inoperative community, and Slavoj Žižek’s ideological fantasy - examining how each draws on artistic practices and, in turn, opens up new forms of artistic experimentation. Together, they offer ways of thinking politics beyond the inherited horizons of twentieth- and twenty-first-century political reality.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micropolitics traces politics at the molecular level, offering tools for perceiving how change emerges not only through sweeping revolutions but through subtle shifts in habits, relations, and modes of thought. For Deleuze, micropolitics is inseparable from art, which functions as a privileged site of experimentation. Throughout the course, we will explore how micropolitical processes unfold in literature, cinema, and music, revealing how artistic practices can actively reshape perception and collective life.

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For Žižek, ideological fantasy shows that power operates not as a hidden structure but at the level of what is visible and taken for granted. Against Foucault’s account of power as primarily implicit and diffuse, Žižek argues that ideology organizes reality through unconscious fantasies that shape our convictions, responsibilities, and sense of what is possible. These fantasies sustain social order yet they are inherently unstable. By turning to art, cinema, and popular culture, Žižek demonstrates how artistic forms can stage the breakdown of ideological fantasy, opening moments in which genuine political transformation becomes thinkable.

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In Nancy, community cannot be founded on shared identity, myth, or symbolic abstraction. Rather, community emerges through a shared exposure to fragility and finitude. Literature plays a crucial role here: it breaks with myth without creating a new one, showing community while also revealing why it can never be fully formed. Art and literature thus do not represent a unified community but stage a fragile being-in-common that resists closure and totalization.​