Reality, Illusion, Fiction, Truth: A Preliminary Study

The PreRIFT project takes its starting point in what is increasingly perceived as falling apart of the social bond, the disintegration of society as society (that is, as more than a sum total of individuals). This disintegration is becoming painfully palpable in all kinds of phenomena that are emerging and rapidly gaining strength today: the rise of populism, which coincides with the growing social and economic segregation as the flip side of globalisation; the often inadequate response to acute global challenges such as the climate crisis and Covid 19 pandemic; conspiracy theories forcefully invading the public space and even mainstream politics; the spread of fake news; raging online wars; a frequent and discomforting impression that people, even from the same country, live in parallel worlds. It is also becoming clearer every day that it is not enough to counter these processes by denouncing their ‘pathology’, by making abstract appeals to reason and science, and by politically managing the symptoms of disintegration through bureaucratic multiplication of regulations. The project proposes to approach these problems through consideration of the conceptual nexus of reality, fiction, illusion and truth. The project is based on the presupposition that the relationship between these dimensions is not an external relation of independent elements; rather they constitute an inherent and inextricable nexus. The project aims at developing an original theory of the complex relationship that binds these notions, which will also have a significant impact on the understanding of each of these notions. In the first segment it will take the complex relationship between reality and fiction (linguistic, symbolic, and imaginary entities) as the perspective from which it would be possible to work towards a concept of the real that differs from its existing conceptions. In the second segment it will focus on two specific modalities of fiction: objective fiction and illusion, and analyse their functioning, particularly in the social sphere. In the third segment it will work towards elaborating a concept of truth that is not so much an epistemic category, as it is a key category involved in the social bond, and in the new perspectives on ethics and politics.