The politics of the invisible: Post-truth’s instrumental use of transparency and Arendt’s ‘nobody’


Yazıcıoğlu S.

Philosophy and Social Criticism, cilt.49, sa.2, ss.164-177, 2023 (AHCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 49 Sayı: 2
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1177/01914537221148307
  • Dergi Adı: Philosophy and Social Criticism
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, IBZ Online, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Periodicals Index Online, Index Islamicus, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Philosopher's Index, Political Science Complete, Social services abstracts, Sociological abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.164-177
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: embodiment, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, nobody, plurality, politics of the invisible, post-truth, transparency
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

© The Author(s) 2023.One of the most significant difficulties that we encounter today in the post-truth era is in constructing a reality in the gap between deceptive pre-given facts and how we experience them in our lives. This gap is mostly caused by our incapacity to see reality beyond the given frames and this very characteristic of post-truth enforces us to examine the meaning of seeing more extensively. Two particular reasons make seeing things and people even more difficult: first, the claim of transparency in politics is essentially deceptive; it suggests us a way of seeing, but what it does, is rather to determine what or whom to see and from which aspect we are allowed to see them. As a result, for politics, transparency turns into a means to a desired end. Second, instrumentalization in politics works effectively only when its administrators and its subjects become invisible ‘nobodies’ who can only act and see in the pregiven limits of reality. For an alternative political approach, this article turns to a phenomenological understanding of reality which emphasizes that reality can only be constituted in the plurality of aspects. For a reconstitution of reality and politics, first, this study offers an analysis of the strong need for such a plurality that requires the inclusion of the invisibles at all levels; second, in order to develop a genuine sense of embodied plurality, it proposes a new political category, here termed ‘the politics of the invisible’.