" Every age dreams the next "

If "history is that laborious dream effect by which we lift ourselves from night to day, from death to life" (Jules Michelet, "Avenir? Avenir?", 1842), then a historical reflection on the fictional power of tyranny can enable us to envisage today's tyrannies. So, the investigation resumes in front of the attractive tyrant painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico in 1338: is he wearing a mask, or has he just been unmasked? The question of a power that caricatures itself to disarm in advance any possibility of subversive criticism raises the question of the relationship between pastiche and postiche, a question we'll return to at the very end of the lecture. For the time being, however, this first introductory session continues with an effort at definition, taking into account the work of literary criticism on fictio and figura, between artifactual theories and the risks of panfictionalism. We propose a deflationary critique of fiction as an experience of thought in tension between the mimetic and axiomatic poles. From then on, political fiction can be defined as a narrative form of political theory or, with Michel Foucault, a test of thought which, from the past, produces "truth effects" on the present and sheds light on future politics.

Contents

• "It's not true, it's worse": how do we start again?
• From the 2016 lecture ("Memories, fictions, beliefs") to the 2017 lecture ("Political fictions")
• From one book to another, looking for the passage
• The book of passages, Walter Benjamin reading Michelet
• History is "that laborious dreamlike effort by which we lift ourselves from night to day, from death to life" (Michelet, "Avenir! Avenir!", 1842)
• Return to Siena: a woman who "dreams in advance of those who are to come"
• On the other side, the tyrant's mask, the face of separation
• Unmasking tyranny, unmasking reality: from Eugène Atget to Charlie Chaplin
• A brief history of evil clowns
• The politics of ugliness and the politics of fakery, pastiche and postiche
• Les fictions qu'on adore détester: aux origines de la télé-réalité (Bernard Lahire, La culture des individus. Dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi, Paris, 2004)
• Political fiction and political fiction: when Guy Debord prophesied rather than described La société du spectacle (1967)
• Defeating the tyrant, envisioning tyranny
• When the Sienese went to Arezzo to celebrate the comune in signoria : the funerary monument of Guido Tarlati (d. 1327), bishop and lord
• Dante and the epistle to Cangrande della Scala (1316)
• The cavalier hero laughs at his victory: "he got us good, and that's that" ("Un tyran attirant", Critique, 823, December 2015, pp. 933-947)
• The attractive tyrant is fictional power itself
• All power is the power of narrative
• When the lord of Milan Bernabò Visconti (d. 1385) became, even in his own lifetime, a fictional character ("Although he was cruel, there was a great deal of justice in his cruelties": l'étrange popularité littéraire d'un justicier sans pitié, Bernabò Visconti", in Olivier Mattéoni and Nicolas Offenstadt dir., Un Moyen Âge pour aujourd'hui. Mélanges offerts à Claude Gauvard, Paris, PUF, 2010, p. 63-71)
• What is fiction? Les théories artéfactuelles et les risques du panfictionnalisme (Françoise Lavocat, Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière, Paris, 2016)
• Fictio et figura : the figure is a "sketch of fiction" (Gérard Genette, Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction, Paris, 2004)
• A deflationary definition of fiction (Olivier Caïra, Définir la fiction. Du roman au jeu d'échecs, Paris, 2011) and the tension between the mimetic and axiomatic poles of a thought experiment
• "An artistic fiction needs to be recognized as fiction in order to function properly" (Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction?, Paris, 1999)
• In "political fiction", does the adjective refer to the or to the political?
• Ancient Greek political anthropology and "the double movement of appearance and occultation of the mode of institution of society" (Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique, ^XIXe-XXe siècles, Paris, 1986)
• In short, political fiction is "a narrative form of political theory" (Emmanuel Bouju and Emily Apter)
• In the Middle Ages: roman à clefs(Le Roman de Fauvel) and songe politique: il me fus avis que je vois
• What is the dreamer's purpose? Christiane Marchello-Nizia's hypothesis
• Choosing a privileged guide: Michel Foucault, "I've never written anything but fiction"
• Writing fiction to put thought to the test of reality (Luca Paltrinieri, L'expérience du concept. Michel Foucault entre épistémologie et histoire, Paris, 2012)
• "Deep down, man doesn't know what he can think; fiction is there to teach him" (Philippe Sollers, "Logique de la fiction", 1963)
• Foucault reads Ludwig Binswanger and Maurice Blanchot: "not to make the invisible visible, but to make us see how invisible is the invisibility of the visible"
• The back story of Jules Verne and the critical power of fiction in Borges
• Michel Foucault again: "inducing effects of truth with a discourse of fiction" to fictionalize "a politics that does not yet exist on the basis of historical truth"