“Politics is theater. It doesn't matter if you win. You make a statement. You say, "I'm here, pay attention to me”. ― Harvey Milk
https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-teatro-e-politica
Theater and politics
It is at least singular that we do not question ourselves about the fact, no less unexpected than disturbing, that the role of political leader is increasingly assumed by actors in our time: this is the case of Zelensky in Ukraine, but the same had happened in Italy with Grillo (gray eminence of the 5 Star Movement) and even before in the United States with Reagan. It is certainly possible to see in this phenomenon evidence of the decline of the figure of the professional politician and of the growing influence of the media and propaganda on every aspect of social life; However, it is clear in any case that what is happening implies a transformation of the relationship between politics and truth which needs to be reflected on. That politics had to do with lies is, in fact, obvious; but this simply meant that the politician, in order to achieve goals that he believed to be true from his point of view, could tell falsehoods without too many scruples.
What is happening before our eyes is something different: there is no longer a use of lies for political ends, but, on the contrary, lies have become in themselves the aim of politics. That is, politics is purely and simply the social articulation of the false. It is therefore understandable why the actor is today necessarily the paradigm of the political leader. According to a paradox that has become familiar to us from Diderot to Brecht, the good actor is not, in fact, the one who passionately identifies with his role, but the one who, maintaining his coolness, keeps it at a distance, so to speak. He will seem all the more true the less he hides his lie. The theatrical scene is, that is, the place of an operation on truth and lies, in which the truth is produced by exhibiting the false. The curtain rises and closes precisely to remind spectators of the unreality of what they are seeing.
What defines politics today - which has become, as has been effectively said, the extreme form of the spectacle - is an unprecedented reversal of the theatrical relationship between truth and lie, which aims to produce the lie through a particular operation on the truth. The truth, as we have been able to see in the last three years, is not, in fact, hidden and indeed remains easily accessible to anyone who wants to know it; but if previously - and not only in the theater - the truth was achieved by showing and unmasking the falsehood ( veritas patefacit se ipsam et falsum ), now instead the lie is produced, so to speak, by exhibiting and unmasking the truth (hence the decisive importance of discussion on fake news ). If the false was once a moment in the movement of the truth, now the truth is only valid as a moment in the movement of the false.
In this situation the actor is, so to speak, at home, even if, compared to Diderot's paradox, he must somehow double himself. No curtain anymore separates the scene from reality, which - according to an expedient that modern directors have made familiar to us - forces spectators to participate in the play. – becomes theater itself. If the actor Zelensky is so convincing as a political leader it is precisely because he manages to always and everywhere utter lies without ever hiding the truth, as if this were nothing but an unavoidable part of his performance. He - like the majority of the leaders of the NATO countries - does not deny the fact that the Russians have conquered and annexed 20% of the Ukrainian territory (which, moreover, has been abandoned by more than twelve million of its inhabitants) nor that his counteroffensive completely failed; nor that, in a situation where his country's survival depends entirely on foreign funding that can cease at any moment, neither he nor Ukraine have any real chance ahead of them. This is why, as an actor, Zelensky comes from comedy. Unlike the tragic hero, who must succumb to the reality of facts that he did not know or believed to be unreal, the comic character makes us laugh because he never ceases to exhibit the unreality and absurdity of his own actions. However, Ukraine, once called Little Russia, is not a comic scene and Zelensky's comedy will ultimately only turn into a bitter, very real tragedy.
January 19, 2024
Giorgio Agamben
Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
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