Fantasmagorie politiche. Per una decostruzione delle strategie retoriche e iconografiche del populismo digitale

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between imaginary and politics, in particular how the legitimization of power, especially in the case of the new populist parties, is entangled with authentically aesthetic procedures. This analysis relies on the prophetic power of W. Benjamin's thought, which finds a renewed interest thanks to the ontological reality of the present, where the crisis of istitutions overlaps in the progressive expansion of the political sphere on digital media as as machine creating consensus. Through an imagined dialogue between the Frankfurt scholars and theorists of the imaginary, the essay aims to show how postmodernity is more than ever a world of phantasmagoria and contemporary subjectivity, starting from this proposition, possesses the tools to achieve the freedom Benjamin dreamed of.