How might we rethink politics beyond familiar patterns of confrontation, polarization, and fixed ideological positions? In recent decades, contemporary philosophy has increasingly turned to art as a way of approaching this question. Rather than offering direct political programs, art provides a space in which new forms of perception, relation, and collective life can be explored.

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This course brings together three key concepts - Gilles Deleuze’s micropolitics, Jean-Luc Nancy’s inoperative community, and Slavoj Žižek’s ideological fantasy - and examines how each engages with artistic practices. In different ways, these thinkers show how art not only reflects political realities but also opens up new ways of thinking and experiencing them.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micropolitics traces political processes at the molecular level, focusing on how change takes place through shifts in habits, affects, and modes of thought, rather than only through large-scale events. For Deleuze, art plays a central role in this process, functioning as a site of experimentation where new forms of perception and relation can emerge. Throughout the course, we will consider how these micropolitical dynamics appear in literature, cinema, and music.

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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 power remains anchored in centralized ideological fantasies that operate in plain sight. 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.​