Transparencies can be deceptive

Abstract

Mistrust threatens political speech and action. However, only language, and, hence, the “appearances” can reveal the truth as we merely know the world through them. There is no other possible access to reality and truth, either social or natural, than what the natural or built world offers to the perception of our senses and on which we build its own “meaning". In the face of the persistent mistrust of outward appearances and, therefore, of language – a semiotic suspicion based on the idea which language is nothing more than a veil whose function is not to say or make the world known, and yet a filter (almost a spell) which prevents us from “feeling” the exact reality of things and to defend a political word “transparent” and “immediate” – this article proposes to analyse the enunciative conflicts of the construction of political discourse as semiotic “mediation".