Między widzialnością a autentycznością w demokracji

BETWEEN VISIBILITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN DEMOCRACY: THE SPACE OF POLITICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HANNAH ARENDT AND ITS CONTEMPORARY RECONFIGURATIONS The aim of the article is to look at the pluralistic democratic space of politics as a game of appearances devoid of authenticity, and shaped by contemporary media technologies in which political opinions have become a derivative of social cognition, referring primarily to perception (visualisation of politics). In this role, it replaced public debate, diversified in form and content, referring to the principles of rationality, which reflected the competitive system of interests and ideas. The theoretical basis for presenting democratic practice as a theatre game – more precisely, a strictly enacted and inauthentic staging based on diverse visual communication – will be Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological perspective. According to the philosopher, the space of politics is mainly a public area of exchange and confrontation in the dimension of visibility and audibility, where we are dealing with revealing ourselves (political actors) in the space of appearance (the articulation process as a result of subjective activity). The starting point for presenting the tension between authenticity and visibility resulting from Arendt’s assumptions will be a discussion of the attributes of a contemporary pluralistic society from the point of view of her theory of the human condition.